New technology impacts on ADCP instruments

Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) instruments are commonly used for sensing oceanographic currents. In the initial generation of these instruments many of the design decisions, and resulting features of the overall instrument, were based on the limitations of the technology available at that time. This paper describes the design decisions underlying a recently developed ADCP instrument, which leverages more modern technologies. These modern technologies remove many of the historical limitations, which caused many of these heritage design decisions to be revisited. The resulting set of features, both in isolation and in relation to each other, prompts a change in the philosophy about how to collect and analyze the instrument data.