Aberdeen Harbour Board

Aberdeen Harbour Board (Scotland UK) has recently taken delivery of a Real Time Environmental Data System. The system has been commissioned from Compass Hydrographic Services to support their port operations and environmental monitoring requirements.

The system provides velocity profile data, tidal elevation, salinity and temperature data. The sensors are located within a harbour where telemetry of the data is performed by cables and a radio link. The data is managed by the port’s main operation centre.

At the heart of the system is a 2MHz Nortek Aquadopp Profiler with a special 2D head inclined 60 degrees from the vertical. This novel configuration makes it possible to measure the along channel velocities in a section which starts close to the bottom of the jetty wall and ends close to the surface in the main channel. A short validation survey using conventional current meters found that measurements taken in each depth cell of the main channel agreed well with those from the real time system.

The implication of the new design is that it is possible to get a good indication of the vertical variability in the currents – from an instrument that is mounted at a protected location on the jetty wall. As such, this new head configuration provides a possible solution to a measurement problem that people have struggled with for a long time. At the Aberdeen harbour site, the currents are influenced by the flow of the River Don. Here the new design makes it possible to resolve the freshwater riverine outflow at the surface as well as the deeper saline flow below. This was considered critical because on the flooding tide the surface and bottom flow can often be moving in the opposite directions.

The goal was to provide a robust system for continuous long term operation which could process and acquire data, and subsequently provide it over the internet for access by users. The software end of this has been accomplished using relational database technology with java web links into the database. The software has also been built with a number of failsafe checks to alert the support team in the event of system faults and to provide a means of checking system integrity remotely.

More about the Aquadopp Profiler can be found here.