Uncertainty Analysis Of Multiple Transects ADCP Discharge Measurements By Moving Boat.

GARCIA, CARLOS M.; FLORES NIETO, FEDERICO; OBERG, KEVIN; DIAZ LOZADA, JOSE M.; OVER, TOM

Durham

Congreso; HYDRAULIC MEASUREMENTS & EXPERIMENTAL METHODS CONFERENCE; 2017

EWRI

In recent years, the use of ADCPs (Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers) for measuring discharge has become very common. Although the moving-boat ADCP measurement technique has been validated by comparing it with other discharge measurement techniques, recent work by various investigators has focused on identifying the sources and magnitude of uncertainty in ADCP discharge measurements. The goals are to obtain realistic estimates of measurement uncertainty and to find ways to reduce this uncertainty. Recently, a computer program called QUant has been developed in Matlab to compute uncertainty estimates using computational methods (i.e. Monte Carlo simulations). This software can be used to estimate the uncertainty of discharge measurements for each moving-boat ADCP transect, by varying different sampling configurations parameters. At present, there are researches going on related to a method to estimate the total uncertainty of a flow discharge measurement (with multiple transects) from the uncertainty estimates made by QUant for a transect. The present work summarizes a new method for estimating multi-transect flow discharge measurement uncertainty using QUant. The proposed method is evaluated using 38 data sets from field validation measurements.