A method for correcting discharge of boat-mounted ADCP measurements

GPS data are usually used to measure boat velocity during boat-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) measurements when bottom tracking is biased by moving bed. GPS cannot provide consistently accurate boat velocity reference because of multipath errors, satellite signal reception problems, and heading errors. In addition, the computation of water velocity from an ADCP mounted onto a moving boat is a vector-algebra problem, thus the discharge calculation is subject to the compass error when GPS is used for boat velocity reference. This paper proposes a method for correcting discharge based on the idea that the discharge calculation is independent of the boat path. The processing of two sets of boat-mounted ADCP measurements integrated with differential GPS and non-differential GPS was simulated to verify the method. The results show that the proposed method performs well in both differential and non-differential GPS conditions. The relative errors range from 0.1% to 1.5% for all measurements with the mean relative errors of 0.7%. Analytical assessment of the GPS errors shows the proposed method is insensitive to the positioning accuracy of GPS, but positioning error of nondifferential GPS may induce relative discharge error of more than 1% when the river or stream is narrow. On the contrary, a relatively small compass or heading error can cause a significant error in water velocity and discharge when using GPS as the boat velocity reference. Therefore, integrating a differential GPS and maintaining a slow boat speed are best practices for discharge measurement, especially for narrow streams or short boat paths.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a method for correcting discharge independently of boat path, suitable for using GPS as boat velocity reference. Experimental results show that the method performs well under both differential and non-differential GPS conditions, with relatively small relative errors.