A compact acoustic Doppler current meter, designed for nearshore surface gravity wave measurements, was field tested by comparison to a colocated array of pressure tranducers. Both measurements systems were bottom mounted in a water depth of 7 m. Each of four acoustic beams, inclined 45¿ from vertical, measures the along-beam velocity at a single range (1 m) about 1.5 m above the seafloor. These four velocity beams are used to estimate low-order moments of the frequency-directional wave spectrum and are compared to pressure measurements on four occasions. Prediction of the (nondirectional) bottom pressure spectrum at sea and swell frequencies (0.04--0.30 Hz), based on the velocity measurements and linear theory, are in excellent agreement with directly measured pressure. The general level of agreement (gain errors less than 5%) is somewhat better than results reported from similar (but spanning a much wider range of conditions) intercomparison studies using convectional in situ current meters. Observed cross spectra between colocated pressure and horizontal velocity components, frequently used to separate turbulence and wave orbital velocities (assuming that the coherence of wave velocity and pressure is equal to 1), are compared to predictions based on the pressure array data and linear wave theory. The observed and predicted pressure-velocity cross spectra are in excellent agreement and show that large coherence reductions can occur in natural wind waves owing to wave directional spreading effects, despite relatively low turbulence energy levels. Wave radiation stresses, estimated from the velocity measurements, also agree well with estimates extracted from the pressure array data. Overall, the intercomparisons show that the present acoustic Doppler system have directional resolution comparable to a pitch-and-roll buoy, and they suggest that higher-order directional information as well as weak nonlinear properties of natural wind waves may be examined with a slightly modified compact system. ¿American Geophysical Union 1991