Acoustic Doppler current profiler raw measurements on the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, 2000-2016, Columbia Environmental Research Center

Between the years 2000 and 2016, scientists and technicians from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Columbia Environmental Research Center (CERC) have collected over 400 field-days worth of acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) measurements on the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, primarily for the purposes of assessing physical aquatic habitat for the pallid sturgeon. Scientists and technicians collected data using boat-mounted Teledyne Rio Grande ADCPs, which were processed using customized scripting tools and archived in standardized formats. To assess longitudinal variability in depth and velocity distributions along the Missouri River, as well as compare the Missouri River to its unaltered analog, the Yellowstone River, we compiled the collected datasets into a single comma-separated value (csv) file using a series of data-processing scripts written in Python. To allow for the comparison of measurements collected only within a specific window of flow exceedance, we conducted geospatial analyses to attribute each ADCP measurement by a discharge from the most relevant USGS gage location (with the most relevant gage location being the gage located between the same major tributaries as the measurement, even if it was not the closest spatially), and assigned each measurement a flow exceedance percentile based on the relevant gage's record between 2000 and 2016. We also conducted general quality control on the data, discarding any ADCP returns where the ADCP measured a depth-averaged velocity greater than 3 meters per second or a depth greater than 16 meters; these values were considered to be an approximate upper bounds for realistic values on the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. The presented csv file lists individual ADCP bins for all measurements that have been archived between 2000 and 2016 by CERC scientists along with their three-dimensional velocity components, depth-averaged velocity magnitude for a given ADCP return, average channel depth for a given ADCP return (computed from four ADCP beams), and fields to classify the data by river location and flow exceedance.