• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.50 no.8
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• pp.521-535
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• 2017

Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) have been widely utilized for assessing streamflow discharge, yet few comprehensive studies were conducted to evaluate discharge uncertainty in consideration of individual uncertainty components. It could be mostly because it was not easy to determine which uncertainty framework can be appropriate to rigorously analyze streamflow discharge driven by ADCPs. In this regard, considerable efforts have been made by scientific and engineering societies to develop a standardized theoretical framework for uncertainty analysis in hydrometry. One of the well-established UA methodology based on sound statistical and engineering concepts is Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty Measurement (GUM) adopted widely by various scientific and research communities. This research fundamentally adapted the GUM framework to assess individual uncertainty components of ADCP discharge measurements, and subsequently provided results of a customized experiment in a controllable real-scale artificial river channel. We focused particularly upon sensitivities of uncertainty components in the GUM framework driven by ADCPs direct measurements such as depths, edge distance, submerged depth, velocity gap, sampling time, repeatability, bed roughness and so on. Section-by-Section method for ADCP discharge measurement was applied for uncertainty analysis for this study. All of measurements were carefully compared with data using other instrumentations such as ADV to evaluate individual uncertainty components.