Effects of pulsating flow on current meter performance

Summarized are laboratory tests for current meter response to pulsating flows. Included are results for mechanical and electromagnetic water-current meters that are commonly used for stream gaging. Most of the vertical-axis and horizontal-axis types of mechanical meters that were tested significantly underregistered the mean flow velocity when the magnitude of the pulsating portion of the flow velocity was greater than half the mean velocity but less than the mean velocity. Errors for all meters tested were largest at the lowest mean flow velocity, 0.076 m/s.