A python tool for AUV-borne ADCP current data processing

Abstract

Most Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) mount Doppler sensors to navigate precisely underwater, where the Global Positioning System (GPS) is unavailable. These sensors -aside of providing accurate AUV velocity with respect to the ground-, can perform currents profiling, measuring currents along the water column. It has been shown that currents measurements taken by AUVs are very close to those taken by bottom-mounted ADCPs and that a 3D approach can yield differences between both instruments of about 0.07 ms-1, averaging AUV data in 90 second time windows. In this paper we present an OceanServer Iver2 AUV 3D water currents processing tool, developed in Python 2.7. The tool outputs .csv files for further data processing/representation as well as plots of the main variables, along with water currents plots.