ANNUAL DATA SUMMARY AND CLIMATOLOGICAL EVALUATION 

 CERC FIELD RESEARCH FACILITY, 1985 



PART I: INTRODUCTION 

 Background 



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

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

 on 712,250 square metres at Duck, N. C. (Figure 1), consists of a 561-m-long 

 research pier and accompanying office and field support buildings. The FRF is 

 located near the middle of Currituck Spit along a 100-km unbroken stretch of 

 shoreline extending south of Rudee Inlet, Va., to Oregon Inlet, N. C. The FRF 

 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 dur- 

 ing severe storms; (b) provide CERC with field experience and data to comple- 

 ment laboratory and analytical studies and numerical models; (c) provide a 

 manned field facility for testing new instrumentation; and (d) serve as a per- 

 manent 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 the 

 National Geodetic Vertical Datum (NGVD) . The pilings are protected against 

 sand abrasion 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 seventh in a series of annual reports and summa- 

 rizes the data collected during 1985. Data for previous years are summarized 

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



