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ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on June 23, 2009
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2009 66(9):1846-1852; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsp168
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© 2009 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Extracting fish and water velocity from Doppler profiler data

Len Zedel1 and Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine2

1 Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, NL, Canada A1B 3X7
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1

Correspondence to L. Zedel: tel: +1 709 737 3106; fax: +1 709 737 8739; e-mail: zedel{at}mun.ca

Zedel, L., and Cyr-Racine, F-Y. 2009. Extracting fish and water velocity from Doppler profiler data. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1846–1852.

Doppler current profilers are optimized for measuring water velocities, but have the demonstrated capability to measure fish swimming speeds. This is possible when fish form schools that are large enough for all multiple Doppler sonar beams to sample the fish speeds at the same time. In situations where fish are not present in at least three acoustic beams, it is impossible to extract fish velocity with the data-processing algorithms normally used to extract water velocity. We present an alternative method of analysing Doppler sonar data that treats data from individual acoustic beams independently, so that velocities can be extracted when fish appear intermittently in the sonar beams. The method determines the variance for each velocity estimate so that data averaging can be adjusted to achieve the desired accuracy. The algorithm is applied to extract both water and fish velocities from Doppler profiler observations of overwintering Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in Smith Sound, Newfoundland. Currents in this enclosed coastal area are slow (~10 cm s–1), and the fish appear to move passively with the water much of the time. However, there are times when the fish have velocities different from those of the water, and profiles averaged over 20 d show clear differences in fish and water velocities.

Keywords: Doppler current profiler, fish behaviour, fisheries acoustics, sonar

Received 16 December 2008; accepted 15 May 2009; advance access publication 23 June 2009.


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