Volkov S., Bogdanov S., Zdorovennova G., Terzhevik A., Zdorovennov R., Palshin N., Efremova T., Kirillin G.
Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP) are widely used for deriving velocity vertical profiles. In recent years these devices were also actively explored for estimations of the energy dissipation rate ε by studying longitudinal velocity structure functions (SF). However, these estimates remain questionable because the correspondent SF method is based on the assumption of the fine-scale isotropy and explores the canonical values for Kolmogorov constants. The last ones, as recent direct measurements and numerical computations prove, are highly variable, thus triggering the errors of ε estimations, which may exceed 50 %. This paper presents an approach to derive the retained information, hidden in the raw along-beam velocities data, which can shed a light on the anisotropy parameters. For this, we developed the inter-beam correlations method, based on the analysis of generalized (four-point) SF. The explicit expression for transverse SF was derived, which made it possible to check the “4/3 law” directly. The method was tested by processing velocity data, obtained from the convective mixing layer in ice-covered lakes Onega and Vendyurskoe
