Experience of Simultaneous Measurements of Parameters of Currents and Hydrological Structure of Water from a Moving Vessel

Abstract—At the Black Sea research site Gelendzhik of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology (IO RAS), a technique has been established for joint current velocity profile measurements using towed ADCP and periodic CTD soundings from on board of the mini R/V Ashamba with high spatiotemporal resolution. In this case, CTD soundings are taken from the sea surface to the bottom layer according to an original method recently proposed by V.T. Paka and tested by him and his colleagues on the Baltic Sea. Simultaneous measurements of this kind are important due to the insufficient knowledge of the effect of submesoscale eddies on the hydrological structure and vertical mixing processes. On the other hand, a promising aspect of fast joint ADCP and CTD surveys from the mini R/V is that their measurements can be automatically recorded to the ship’s server in real time. It’s connected transmitter can relay measurement data to a coastal data center, and they can be assimilated into numerical models for now- and hindcast calculations of the state of the marine environment. Thus, in the future, this technique can be considered an operational oceanograpic tool, the development of which is one of the main tasks being solved at the Gelendzhik research site.