Technology of water flow measurement represented by thirty years of CMTC

The Current Measurement Technology Committee or CMTC joined the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society in the 10
^th
year of that society and CMTC workshops have continued through its 9
^th
workshop held in 2008. These workshops have documented with their published proceedings the rise of acoustic Doppler profiling, the appearance and later development of HF radar techniques for observing surface current, electromagnetic profiling, and laser Doppler and ultrasonic point measurements of current. Workshop proceedings document the applications of the various measurement techniques to estuaries, rivers, and ports. And direct and indirect measurements of waves and turbulence have been increasingly reported. A division of practitioners of current measurement into Wizards and High Priests, Cognoscenti, and Happy Go-Lucky Users has continued at each workshop. Typically at one workshop a new technology is described, at the next workshop four or five years later, instruments resulting from the new technology have been compared to trusted older techniques, and, at the workshop after that, use of the technique in oceanographic studies is reported. Although some instruments first brought to the attention of the observational community at a CMTC workshop have now become commodities, there remain intriguing problems and solutions that are presented at every gathering. The CMTC Proceedings are a valuable record of these developments, tests, and applications.