ADCP Current Profile Validation Summary

Data Source & Notes

The ADCP current profile observations were collected as part of WAMSI Westport Marine Science Program, Project 5.1 (Multi-decadal ocean boundary conditions and field measurements), led by Prof Charitha Pattiaratchi and data curated by Tanziha Mahjabin, from the University of Western Australia (UWA). Seven bottom-mounted, upward-looking ADCPs were deployed across Cockburn Sound between April 2021 and August 2022, providing vertical current profiles at 0.15–0.50 m vertical resolution and 2–20 minute sampling intervals.

The field data has been applied here with minimal treatment and includes artefacts associated with complex field deployments. The following processing and QC steps have been applied to prepare the comparison plots:

• Out-of-water filtering — timesteps where pressure sensor depth < 1 m are masked (pre-deployment / retrieval periods).
• Sidelobe contamination masking — cells above PSD × cos(beam_angle) are set to NaN to remove surface reflection artefacts.
• Pressure sensor dropout masking — timesteps where PSD drops > 3 m below the deployment median are excluded.
• Speed threshold — current speeds exceeding 2.0 m/s are masked as physically implausible.
• Timezone alignment — ADCP timestamps (UTC) are shifted +8 h to match the model output in local time (AWST).
• Vertical datum — all plots use metres relative to Australian Height Datum (mAHD). The model’s hybrid z-sigma vertical coordinate is resolved as time-varying layer elevations.
• CS1 site coordinates corrected — the NetCDF metadata places CS1 ~7 km from the official site_key.xlsx position; the corrected coordinates (−32.1463, 115.6976) are used for model extraction.
• CS7 Eco ADCP direction correction (+96°) — a systematic compass/convention offset was identified by comparing observed and modelled current directions. The correction is applied to both Eco ADCP deployments (Dec 2021 and Jan–Mar 2022).
• CS7 Aquadopp HR excluded — the June 2022 Aquadopp HR deployment has a different directional offset and limited vertical coverage; it is excluded from this summary.
• Common depth axis — all panels use a fixed vertical range (−22 to +1.5 mAHD) for consistent cross-site comparison. Brown shading indicates the seabed from the model bathymetry.
• Wind speed — 10 m wind speed is extracted from the WRF-PERTH atmospheric model (see Chapter 7) at the same grid cell as the current profile, providing context for wind-driven current events.

Model: CSIEM1.7.0 2022B (TUFLOW-FV) — Nov 2021 to Dec 2022. Speed colourmap fixed at 0–0.3 m/s. Direction uses the twilight_shifted cyclic colourmap (towards convention, °N).