DOI: 10.15485/1603365
title: Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune New River Estuary - Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) Results

description: Critical military training and testing on lands along the nation’s coastal and estuarine shorelines are increasingly placed at risk because of development pressures in surrounding areas, impairments due to other anthropogenic disturbances, and increasing requirements for compliance with environmental regulations. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) intends to enhance and sustain its training and testing assets and to optimize its stewardship of natural resources through the development and application of an ecosystem-based management approach on DoD installations. To accomplish this goal, particularly for installations in estuarine/coastal environments, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) launched the Defense Coastal/Estuarine Research Program (DCERP) as a minimum 10-year effort at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune (MCBCL) in North Carolina. The results of the first six years of the program (DCERP1) are presented here.The overarching objectives of DCERP are to: (1) understand the effects of military training activities, infrastructure development, and other coastal military installations; (2) develop models, tools, and indicators to evaluate ecosystem health; and (3) recommend adaptive management strategies to sustain ecosystem natural resources within the context of an active military installation.This data package contains a zipfile of results from Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) used to collect current profiles throughout the New River Estuary in 2009: Teledyne RD Instrument’s acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) were deployed throughout the NRE to understand current flows and tidal extent. (Current velocity and water level data collected by the ADCPs were also used to validate a hydrodynamic model of the NRE.) Two ADCPS were deployed by Marker 12 and the Highway 172 bridge from late-February to early-July 2009. These ADCPs were attached to steel frames that rested on the sediment surface with the ADCP looking upward to make full water column profiles of water velocity minus a 1-m blanking between the instrument and sediment surface. Also attached to the steel frames were conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) sensors, which provided concomitant salinity, temperature, and water depth data with the ADCP current measurements. Two ADCPS were also deployed in close proximity to the AVPs in Stones and Morgan Bays from mid-July to mid-December 2009. These ADCPs were deployed flush to the estuary floor to maximize the full vertical sampling capability at these shallow stations and the AVPs collected coincidental temperature, salinity, and depth measurements. For all deployments, the ADCPs were programmed in fast ping-rate mode 12 using 20 pings per ensemble and collected profiles in 10-cm bins every 6 minutes yielding a standard deviation in velocity measurements of 1.27 cm s-1. Current velocity and water level data were analyzed to understand the tidal influence on circulation within the NRE. Harmonic analyses were performed to extract the dominant tidal constituents from the velocity and depth records using T-tide run in MATLAB (Pawlowicz et al., 2002). These measurements of tidal amplitude and phase were then used to validate the high-resolution Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) Model of the NRE region.