Signature1000 and Signature500, two advanced five-beam current profiling systems, are made with the most demanding scientific user in mind. Built on the entirely new AD2CP platform, Signature1000 and Signature500 are designed for unprecedented performance in high energy turbulent environments, while also giving users the freedom to employ two measurement schemes at one time. In addition to choosing from a variety of measurement modes to employ, Signature1000 and Signature500 users may also invite collaborators to run other sampling schemes simultaneously. If a researcher is interested solely in average current profiles, he or she is easily able to collect these while a colleague interested in turbulence estimation can utilize the burst mode simultaneously along the vertical beam at 8 Hz.
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Inside the Nortek Signature series is an entirely new platform. AD2CP was built to increase flexibility and extend instrument capabilities over the coming decade. At the core, AD2CP is a multi-function instrument, which may include more transducers, multiple acoustic frequencies, and several measurement modes operating simultaneously. AD2CP features proper broadband processing, capable of implementing different broadband schemes. Signature Series AD2CPs employ frequency based coding, more easily defining appropriate transmit sequences. Today’s most advanced electronics and smaller components, make AD2CPs smaller, lighter, and lower in power than previous instruments. Smarter interfaces feature both ASCII and binary serial interfaces, Ethernet ports, and a Linux operating system with TCP/IP protocol, a Web server, and an FTP server. A dramatically improved 20 Mbit rate allows download of 1 GB of data in 6 minutes.
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Turbulence estimation with a typical ADCP is far from ideal due to assumptions made during analysis, a single sampling strategy, and indirect measurements of most quantities of interest. Signature1000 and Signature500’s fifth beam provides a direct measurement of one velocity component, typically the vertical. This direct measurement allows easy interpretation of along beam spatial gradients as well as by cell time series analysis, eliminating the need to combine beams to obtain orthogonal velocity components. High sampling rates, flexible sampling strategies, and large velocity ranges make Signature1000 and Signature500 ideal for turbulence studies from the surf zone to the open ocean.
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