An experimental investigation of high frequency acoustic temperature measurement

Temperature has a considerable influence on the shallow water. Due to important economic value and relation to human activity, the on-line and real-time water temperature monitoring is of great scientific and practical significance. This paper has performed an experiment of a high frequency acoustic temperature measurement. Reciprocal sound transmission and the signal cross-correlation method were used to estimate the averaged water temperature over the testing region. Furthermore, a pool experiment was performed in order to estimate the measurement error. As a comparison, a set of temperature data was measured by using conductivity-temperature-depth system (CTD) and their temperature relative error was about 1.7%. The results showed that the temperature derived from high frequency acoustic temperature measurement was in good agreement with CTD, verifying its feasibility in measuring the average temperature.