CERC FIELD RESEARCH FACILITY ENVIRONMENTAL DATA SUMMARY, 1977-79 



H. Carl Miller 

 I. INTRODUCTION 



The U.S. Army Coastal Engineering Research Center's (CERC) Field Research 

 Facility (FRF), located on 176 acres at Duck, North Carolina (Fig. 1), con- 

 sists of a 561-meter-long. research pier and an accompanying office building. 

 The FRF site is near the middle of Currituck Spit along a 100-kilometer 

 unbroken stretch of shoreline that extends south from Rudee Inlet in Virginia 

 to Oregon Inlet in North Carolina. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to 

 the east and the Currituck Sound and mainland to the west. The facility is 

 designed to (1) provide a rigid platform for measuring waves, currents, water 

 levels, and bottom elevations, especially during severe storms; (2) provide 

 CERC with the field experience and data to complement laboratory studies and 

 the evaluation of numerical models; (3) provide a manned field facility for 

 testing new instrumentation; and (4) serve as a permanent field base of 

 operations for physical and biological studies of the site and adjacent 

 region. 



The research pier is a reinforced concrete structure supported on 0.9- 

 meter-diameter steel piles spaced 12.2 meters apart along the pier length and 

 4.6 meters apart across the width. The piles are embedded approximately 15 

 meters below the ocean bottom. The pier deck is 6.1 meters wide and extends 

 from behind the dune line to about the 8-meter water depth contour, at a 

 height of 7.8 meters above mean sea level (MSL). Concrete erosion collars 

 protect the pilings against sand abrasion, and a cathodic system protects the 

 pilings against corrosion. 



A Basic Environmental Measurements (BEM) program has been established to 

 collect basic oceanographic and meteorological data, which are reduced, ana- 

 lyzed, and the results published. 



This report, the first in a series of annual reports, summarizes the 

 results of the first two complete years (1978 and 1979) of basic measurements; 

 available data for 1977 are also included. The report is organized such that 

 descriptions of the instrumentation (Sec. Ill) and data collection and analy- 

 sis procedures (Sec. IV) precede reporting of the data (Sec. V). Section VI 

 describes the procedure for obtaining additional data. Although this is 

 intended as a stand-alone document, references should be consulted for details 

 of some procedures and instrumentation. 



Future annual reports will have approximately the same format, but an 

 interpretation of the data will be included. Readers' comments on the format 

 and usefulness of the data presented are encouraged. 



In addition to the annual reports, monthly data reports summarizing the 

 same types of data shortly after the data are collected will be available upon 

 request. 



