Performance Evaluation in the Field

Because the ocean can provide the full spectrum of motions past a flow sensor, testing in the field environment is a useful and necessary, though never sufficient, method for evaluating the performance of current measuring devices. A properly designed field experiment can provide information about the response characteristics of the instrument under a particular set of environmental conditions. The experiment, however, should necessarily be linked to a complementary set of laboratory tests. For meaningful results, the test site must be judiciously chosen to have environmental conditions that can be measured and understood, yet representative, of the environment in which the instrument will be used and for which it was designed. The lack of perfect sensors to measure the environment complicates the effort and additional techniques such as in-situ diver observation and lagrangian measurements using biological and dye tracers are useful. A rigid frame sensor platform has been successfully employed for field evaluations, particularly in regions having large vertic al shears.