Geyer et al.

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

Volume 19, 2013

http://acousticalsociety.org/

ICA 2013 Montreal

Montreal, Canada
2 - 7 June 2013
Acoustical Oceanography
Session 1aAO: Estuarine Acoustics
1aAO1. The impact of acoustic oceanographic methods on estuarine dynamics
research
W Rockwell Geyer*, Peter Traykovski and Andone Lavery
*Corresponding author's address: Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole,
Massachusetts 02543, rgeyer@whoi.edu
Acoustic methods have revolutionized the field of estuarine physical oceanography, providing orders-of-magnitude improvement in the
temporal and spatial resolution of velocity, suspended sediment and density structure. That revolution started in the 1970's when some Japanese
researchers realized that they could resolve the structure of the estuarine salt wedge with a conventional echo sounder by turning up the gain.
David Farmer became a champion of this technique, most notably exemplified by his sensational images of hydraulic jumps in fjords.
Refinements to this approach with broadband sonars are producing high-resolution imagery of shear instability and its transition to turbulence
in highly stratified estuaries. Acousticians are now going beyond simply imaging the turbulent structure to quantifying the dissipation rate based
on the intensity of acoustic backscatter. The acoustic Doppler current profiler has impacted all of physical oceanography, but it is particularly
valuable in estuarine settings for resolving the intense vertical shears and complex horizontal velocity gradients in estuaries. Acoustic
backscatter also provides a key approach to quantifying suspended sediment. The high spatial resolution afforded by acoustic backscatter
sensors has revealed the occurrence of fluid muds in estuaries - extremely high concentrations that alter the dynamics and rheology of the flow.
Published by the Acoustical Society of America through the American Institute of Physics

2013 Acoustical Society of America [DOI: 10.1121/1.4799117]

Received 22 Jan 2013; published 2 Jun 2013
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Geyer et al.

ABSTRACT
Acoustic methods have revolutionized the field of estuarine physical oceanography, providing orders-of-magnitude
improvement in the temporal and spatial resolution of velocity, suspended sediment and density structure. That
revolution started in the 1970s when some Japanese researchers realized that they could resolve the structure of the
estuarine salt wedge with a conventional echo sounder by turning up the gain. David Farmer became a champion of
this technique, most notably exemplified by his sensational images of hydraulic jumps in fjords. Refinements to this
approach with broadband sonars are producing high-resolution imagery of shear instability and its transition to
turbulence in highly stratified estuaries. Acousticians are now going beyond simply imaging the turbulent structure
to quantifying the dissipation rate based on the intensity of acoustic backscatter. The acoustic Doppler current
profiler has impacted all of physical oceanography, but it is particularly valuable in estuarine settings for resolving
the intense vertical shears and complex horizontal velocity gradients in estuaries. Acoustic backscatter also provides
a key approach to quantifying suspended sediment. The high spatial resolution afforded by acoustic backscatter
sensors has revealed the occurrence of fluid muds in estuaries extremely high concentrations that alter the
dynamics and rheology of the flow. Acoustic propagation has not received much attention in estuaries, in part
because of the horrible propagation characteristics within the estuarine water column. But the need for long-term
monitoring and surveillance in estuaries begs the attention of the acoustics community to take on this formidable
challenge.
INTRODUCTION
Major breakthroughs in science often occur when a researcher attacks an old problem with a new tool. Acoustic
methods have provided to estuarine oceanography what the telescope provided to astronomy. This paper provides a
brief review of the progress of the field of estuarine oceanography that can be attributed to the application of
acoustic tools to our science. In most cases, the acousticians have been behind the scenes, developing and refining
the methods, designing the hardware and software that provide new tools and methodologies, handing them over to
the oceanographers with only modest interaction and collaboration. However, often the most spectacular progress
comes when the research engages both the acoustician and the oceanographer, sometimes embodied within the same
researcher. In the following sections, the impact of acoustic methods on our understanding of estuarine dynamics
will be described, and where appropriate, the role of acousticians in that research will be highlighted.
ECHO SOUNDERS
Echo sounders were developed in the 1920s for measuring water depth, but it was not until the1960s that estuarine
researchers realized that they could use them to reveal the internal density structure. Fukushima et al. (1964) first
reported the method, and they and their colleagues became leaders in the observation of the time-dependent

FIGURE 1. This echo sounding of the salinity interface in the Ishikari River, obtained in 1967 was one of the first examples of
the use of acoustics to reveal density structure and mixing processes in estuaries (from Yakuwa and Ohtani, 1969).

hydraulics and mixing processes in estuaries (Fig. 1). David Farmer and J. Dungan Smith met this team of
researchers at an estuarine conference, and Farmer adopted the methodology for studies of hydraulics and mixing in
fjords such as Knight Inlet and the Fraser River. Prior to this interaction, Farmer had pursued his estuarine studies
using conventional in situ instruments, but he immediately recognized the potential of acoustic methods, and he

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adjusted his career path appropriately. Farmer became a champion of the use of acoustic methods for oceanographic
studies, serving both to advance the acoustic methodologies and to use the novel acoustic measurements to advance
our understanding of stratified flow dynamics, particularly in estuarine environments. The studies of hydraulics and
mixing in Knight Inlet provide some of the most dramatic examples of internal hydraulic transitions and associated
mixing processes ever obtained (Fig. 2).

FIGURE 2. Echo sounding from the sill at Knight Inlet during ebb, showing a dramatic hydraulic transition from subcritical (on
the left) to supercritical (to the right of the sill crest), with imbedded shear instabilities at 10-20 m depth in the transition zone
(from Farmer and Armi, 1989).

These images provided Farmer and Armi with critical guidance for the development of their theory of hydraulic
control in stratified flows (e.g., Armi and Farmer 1986), which has had broad impact on our understanding of flows
in estuaries, straits and other stratified regimes that encounter topography.
BROAD-BAND ACOUSTIC BACKSCATTER
Increasing the band-width of backscatter measurements in estuaries provided two major advances in the research.
The first is that by using pulse compression, the resolution of acoustic imagery could be greatly increased. A
striking example of the use of this technology for estuarine research is the imagery of shear instability obtained by
Andone Lavery in the Connecticut River estuary, using a multi-frequency Edgetech broad-band system (Fig. 3).
Pulse-compression of the broad-band signal provided vertical resolution on the order of 5-10 cm (limited in most
cases by the beam width rather than the range resolution). This approach provides unprecedented resolution of the
internal structure of shear instabilities, which are among the most important mechanisms for mixing of stratified
flows in estuaries, in the ocean and in the atmosphere. One of the important outcomes of this research is the

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identification of secondary instabilities, which was made possible by the increased vertical resolution that broadband methods provide. The secondary instabilities were found within the braids of the instabilities, the diagonal
bands of high backscatter that correspond to zones of intense shear and amplified density gradients. The analysis of
these images lead to the conclusion that the dominant mixing associated with these instabilities occurs not in the
coresthe zones encompassed by the braids, but rather in the braids themselves, due to the initiation of
turbulence by the secondary instabilities (Geyer et al., 2010). These images have motivated new numerical studies
of the transition to turbulence by shear instabilities (e.g., Mashayek and Peltier 2012). More progress in
understanding the transition to turbulence within shear instabilities and its impact on estuarine dynamics will occur
as a result of the use of broad-band acoustics for its other important applicationthe quantification of turbulence.

FIGURE 3. Broad-band backscatter image of shear instability at the mouth of the Connecicut River estuary, using a ??? kHz
Edgetech system. Of particular significance are the fine-scale features resolved by this system, indicating the presence of
secondary shear instabilities at scales of ~20 cm.

The second major advance of broad-band acoustic methods for application to estuarine dynamics is its application in
the quantification of turbulence. A number of researchers over the years have hypothesized that backscatter within
estuaries was the direct result of either stratification (Wright, 1970) or the combination of stratification and
turbulence (Seim et al., 1995). Recently, Lavery and colleagues have used the broad-band acoustic spectrum to
distinguish scattering by turbulence from scattering by other sources, and then to quantify the intensity of turbulence
based on the acoustic spectral level (Lavery et al., 2010a,b, submitted). The backscatter intensity is most closely
related to the rate of dissipation of temperature or salinity variance, depending on whether the stratification is due to
temperature or salinity. In estuaries, salinity tends to dominate the stratification, and it also tends to provide the
dominant source of acoustic backscatter (for example as observed in Fig. 3, in which the salinity difference from top
to bottom is nearly 30 parts per thousand). This method does not replace in situ measurement of turbulence, but it
has the potential to provide much more spatial and temporal information about the occurrence and mechanisms of
turbulence than previous approaches.
ACOUSTIC DOPPLER VELOCITY MEASUREMENTS?
Acoustic Doppler measurements of water velocity originated from instruments to measure ship speed. Rowe and
Young (1989) adopted the same technology for use in obtaining vertical profiles of velocity for oceanographic
purposes, creating the acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP), which has become the standard means of
measuring currents in the ocean. The ADCPs impact on estuarine research was aided by the development of

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bottom tracking, using the echo from the sea-bed to determine the vessel speed and subtract it to obtain the water
velocity. This method provides the ability for high-resolution surveys of currents in estuaries and has fueled much
of our present understanding of the three-dimensional structure of estuaries e.g., Chant and Wilson, 1997, Jay et al.
1997).
The most exciting, recent developments in acoustic Doppler velocity profile measurement involve pulse-coherent
methods, which provide spatial resolution on the order of 1 cm and temporal resolution of 10 Hz or higher. This
allows profilers to measure the fine-scale interactions between topography and the flow as well as the spatial
structure of the turbulence. Traykovski has spent the last few years refining methods for resolving boundary-layer
structure in estuaries and coastal environments with pulse-coherent systems. One of the big challenges that has to be
overcome for the use of pulse-coherent approaches is the velocity ambiguity due to phase wrapping. Based on a
an approach developed by Zedel and Hay (2010), Traykovski (2011) has overcome this with using multiplefrequency successive pulse, thereby allowing an multi-frequency de-aliasing scheme for resolving His latest
application, in a tidal inlet with large sand waves, reveals the vertical structure of the turbulent velocity fluctuations
and the impact of the bedforms on the time-averaged velocity structure (Fig. 4).

FIGURE 4. Pulse-coherent Doppler profiler measurements from a fixed platform, with a downward-looking, multistatic array of
transducers that resolve a single, vertically oriented, insonified column, in a tidal inlet with sand dunes of approximately 0.5 m
amplitude. The bottom is at 1.1 m range from the transducer at the time of these measurements. The upper panels show
instantaneous horizontal (left) and vertical (right) velocity, showing turbulent bursts of low momentum fluid (note the free-stream
velocity is negative, i.e., ebbing, at this time). Conditional averaging the periods with reduced along-channel flow (green line in
lower panels) shows the influence of flow separation downstream of the dune crest, compared with a more logarithmic profile
(blue line) during non-separating conditions.

OTHER IMPACTS OF ACOUSTICS ON ESTUARINE RESEARCH

The above research efforts only represent a small sampling of the broad impacts of acoustics on estuarine research.
Another area in which acoustics has had a profound impact is on the quantification of sediment transport and fluid
mud (e.g., Traykovski et al., 2004). More research by Traykovski and colleagues using the combination of
backscatter intensity and pulse-coherent Doppler is providing in situ estimates of viscosity within fluid mud layers.
Acoustics provide an increasingly important tool for the quantification of biological quantities in the oceanthis is

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particularly relevant in estuaries, where the spatial gradients are intense, and thus the capability of high resolution,
extensive sampling is particularly important. Acoustic propagation has not received much attention in estuaries, nor
have studies of ambient noise as a basic research tool. These are areas where considerable progress can be expected
in the near future.
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