Internship: Sediment Acoustics

Sediment Acoustics

Summary: Acoustic instruments are increasingly being used to measure suspendedsediment concentration (SSC) in fluvial environments. The USGS Office of Surface Water, USGS Sediment Acoustics Leadership Team, and the Federal Interagency Sedimentation Project are developing standardized methods and software for estimating SSC from acoustic backscatter from acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs). The objective of this work is to (1) enhance ongoing work to estimate SSC from downward looking ADCPs used in river measurements, (2) create an operational software tool for doing this, and (3) validate the approach by means of field data collection and analysis.