ADCPMENU FAQ

Topics

The current ADCP Menu Version is 2.0
The current RDI2CDF Version is 1.0

Will rdi2cdf.m work on my narrowband data?
My 3D plots are all black!
There is a bin missing from my 3D plot.
Beam to earth conversions do not exactly match BBLIST output.
Where is my bottom ping data?

Will rdi2cdf.m work on my narrowband data?

No. However, there are enough narrowband users out there who seem to like this concept that I have already heard from some folks interested in porting the code. Let me know if you want to help, and can put everyone in touch with one another.

My 3D plots are all black!

You hit a MATLAB limitation. The data density along the x axis is too great. If you reset the x axis limits to something smaller, you will see you data. This can be inserted around line 507 in adcpview.m, or you can do it manually. To see and change the x-axis settings, make the 3D image the current figure and use the command:
get(gca, 'xlim')
set(gca, 'xlim', [ymin ymix])
We're working on a solution to this, one of my colleagues has a very nice zooming window that he is adapting for this application, so stand by.

There is a bin missing from my 3D plot.

The 3D plot will omit the last bin from the data plot. This is an artifact of MATLAB 4.0. Though the MATLAB documentation says that using shading('interp') will force the plot to use all the data rows, I have tried this and it does not work. I hope to see this gone in MATLAB 5.0.

Beam to earth conversions do not exactly match BBLIST output.

For data recorded in beam format: The beam2earth function does not yet include transducer and compass calibration adjustments. The conversion from beam to earth agrees within 0.25 cm/s with BBLIST output. I am still working on this problem. ADCPMENU version 1.1 testing on broadband data got to within 8e-4 cm/s of BBLIST's answer if I got the sound speed adjustment just right. However, there are some fine points about how the ADCP computes sound speed based on available sensors that I am still working on, so you may not get 8e-4 accuracy in all cases. For various reasons, we here at the Woods Hole Field Center need to record in beam format, so this situation _will_ improve.

If your data was recorded in earth coordinates, you have nothing to worry about (if the compass and tilt sensors did their jobs well).

Where is my bottom ping data?

Since this code is written for bottom mounted, long term, time-series measurements, bottom ping data is ignored. The code doesn't seem to choke on data with bottom pings, but since my work is always self contained, I can't be sure. Perhaps someone can help out with this?

Hope this FAQ helps!