ANNUAL DATA SUMMARY FOR 1984 

 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, an accompanying office, and field support buildings. The FRF is near 

 the middle of Currituck Spit along a 100-km unbroken stretch of shoreline ex- 

 tending south from Rudee Inlet, Va., to Oregon Inlet, N. C. The FRF is bor- 

 dered 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, cur- 

 rents, water levels, and bottom elevations can be measured, especially during 

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

 laboratory 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 

 adjacent 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's 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 program has been established to 

 collect basic oceanographic and meteorological data at the site, reduce and 

 analyze these data, and publish the results. 



4. This report is the sixth in a series of annual reports and summa- 

 rizes the data collected during 1984. Data for previous years are summarized 

 by Miller (1982 and 1984) and Miller, et al. (1985, 1986a, and 1986b). De- 

 scriptions of the instrumentation, including sensor calibration and 



* A table of factors for converting non-SI units of measurement to SI 

 (metric) units is presented on page 10. 



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