OSADCP Toolbox

OSADCP_Toolbox

Vessel-mounted Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (VMADCPs) provide velocity profiles of the upper ocean along the ship track. They are a key tool in oceanographic research to study the oceanic circulation and the associated distribution of mass, heat, contaminants and other tracers. In order to obtain high-quality ocean current data from vessel-mounted ADCP measurements, a number of requirements must be met, from system installation and data acquisition measures to certain essential processing steps. Here, we present an open-source Python toolbox called OSADCP for scientists to convert, clean, calibrate and organize binary raw vessel-mounted ADCP data for scientific use. The toolbox is designed to process VMADCP measurements in deep water by Teledyne RDI Ocean Surveyor ADCPs and the data acquisition software VMDAS.

About OSADCP

OSADCP emerged from the MATLAB-based OSSI­ toolbox, which was developed over many years at GEOMAR, Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. It has been further developed for the standardized handling of VMADCP data sets collected as part of the Underway Research Data program of the German Marine Research Alliance. To facilitate access for the whole scientific community, OSADCP is written in Python. The software is designed to process ADCP raw data acquired with RDI’s data acquisition software VMDAS. A basic framework of the software is made available to the scientific community. The version described here is prepared for processing ENX files recorded by VMDAS, and requires both good ADCP and navigation data. By default, OSADCP processes ENX files, which requires both high-quality and complete ADCP raw data and navigation data. A carefully planned ADCP and data acquisition system fulfils these requirements in most cases. From our experience, working with ENX files is therefore generally preferred due to the simplicity of the handling. In the event that problems arise with either ADCP or navigation data, that require for example editing of beam-wise ADCP velocities or the manual merging of navigation data, OSADCP has special modules processing either ENR or ENS files that are not yet made publicly available.
OSADCP, the underlying priciples of ADCP measurement and the workflow it is embedded in are described great detail in a separate scientific article (Kopte et al. 2024)