ANNUAL DATA SUMMARY FOR 1981 

 CERC FIELD RESEARCH FACILITY 



PART I: INTRODUCTION 



1. The US Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (WES) Coastal 

 Engineering Research Center's (CERC's) Field Research Facility (FRF) located 

 on 176 acres* at Duck, N. C. (Figure 1) , consists of a 561-m-long research 

 pier and an accompanying office building. The FRF is located near the middle 

 of Currituck Spit along a 100-km unbroken stretch of shoreline extending south 

 from Rudee Inlet in Virginia to Oregon Inlet, N. C. It is bordered by the 

 Atlantic Ocean to the east and Currituck Sound to the west. The Facility is 

 designed to (a) provide a rigid platform from which waves, currents, water 

 levels, and bottom elevations can be measured, especially during severe 

 storms; (b) provide CERC with field experience and data to complement labora- 

 tory and analytical studies and numerical models; (c) provide a manned field 

 facility for testing new instrumentation; and (d) serve as a permanent field 

 base of operations for physical and biological studies of the site and adja- 

 cent region. 



2. The research pier is a reinforced concrete structure supported on 

 0.9-m-diam steel piles spaced 12.2 m apart along the pier length and 4.6 m 

 apart across the width. The piles are embedded approximately 20 m below the 

 ocean bottom. The pier deck is 6.1 m wide and extends from behind the dune 

 line to about the 6-m water depth contour at a height of 7.8 m above National 

 Geodetic Vertical Datum (NGVD) . The pilings are protected against sand abra- 

 sion by concrete erosion collars and against corrosion by a cathodic system. 



3. An FRF Measurements and Analysis (FRFMA) program has been estab- 

 lished to collect basic oceanographic and meteorological data at the site, 

 reduce and analyze these data, and publish the results. 



4. This report is the third in a series of annual reports and summar- 

 izes the data collected during 1981. Data for 1977-1979 and 1980 are summar- 

 ized in Miller 1982 and 1984, respectively. This report is organized such 

 that descriptions of the instrumentation, including sensor calibration and 

 maintenance (Part III) and data collection and analysis techniques (Part IV) 

 precede reporting of the data (Part V). Appendixes A-D present, respectively, 



* To convert acres to hectares, use a conversion factor of 0,40469. 



