YVETTE-a free-fall shear profiler

Document Type

Article

Date of Original Version

1-1-1979

Abstract

An instrument has been developed to measure simultaneously vertical shear and in situ density. It consists of a 4-m long vertically oriented tube at the lower end of which are (i) an orthogonal pair of acoustical current meters with 0.05 cm s-1 sensitivity and (ii) a Neil Brown CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth recorder). The data, which are recorded digitally on cassette tape, are obtained 2 1 2 times each second and a fall rate of 25 cm s su-1 correspond to a measurement every 10 cm. We have developed and tested an inversion algorithm for quantitatively reconstructing the shear over scales > 10 × larger than the instrument. This is required because the whole tube responds to changes in the horizontal velocity and the current meters measure only the difference between the water and instrument speeds. Thus YVETTE can be used to compute the Richardson number profile for scales between 0.5 and ∼ 50 m. © 1979.

Publication Title, e.g., Journal

Deep Sea Research Part A, Oceanographic Research Papers

Volume

26

Issue

6

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