In 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers undertook a large-scale interagency field study to determine the influence of commercial barge vessels on the efficacy of the Electric Dispersal Barrier System (EDBS) in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) in preventing fish passage. This study included a series of trials in which a tow, consisting of a tug vessel and six fully-loaded barges, transited the EDBS in both upstream-bound (n = 23) and downstream-bound (n = 22) directions. A 1,200 kHz Teledyne RDI Channel Master Acoustic Doppler Velocity Meter (ADVM) was mounted on the barge at the position of the rake-to-box junction. The ADVM faced outward from the side of the barge (side-looking) and was placed at a depth of 1.4 meters below the water surface. The ADVM was located at a distance of 0.7 meters from the box side of the gap (measured toward the rake), and recessed 0.93 meters into the gap as measured perpendicular to the side of the barge. The side-looking ADVM measured horizontal profiles of streamwise and cross-stream components of velocity at 35 bins spaced by 0.5 meters starting at 0.8 meters and up to 17.8 meters measured perpendicular to the side of the barge, unless the barge was within 17.8 meters of the West canal wall. All velocity measurements represent an average of 10 pings, recorded every 10 seconds during measurement. A Hemisphere V102(TM) differential GPS (dGPS) with Doppler-based heading was mounted on the box side of the rake-to-box junction and synchronized with the side-looking ADVM. The dGPS provided sub-meter accuracy positions, heading (accuracy ± 0.75°), and speed of the tow at a sampling frequency of 10 Hz. The time-stamped velocity measurements from the barge-mounted ADVM was matched to the nearest-in-time dGPS position and corrected for the velocity of the moving tow. Once corrected for the movement of the tow, the velocity data were rotated into the local streamwise-normal coordinate system, such that reported streamwise velocities are parallel to the banklines of the CSSC at the EDBS and positive downstream, and reported cross-stream velocities are perpendicular to the banklines and positive toward the east canal bank. All ADVM velocity time series data are included in this data release as Comma Separated Value (CSV) files.