A free-fall vertical profiler developed by Ocean University of China had been deployed in the South China Sea with the descend speed of 0.35–0.4 m/s. Both of the fast-response thermistor and shear probes are attached to the turbulence observation instrument, which are used to estimate the turbulence intensity. Throughout the observation period, the profiler succeed to collect time series of turbulence shear and temperature fluctuations and this allowed certain issues to be addressed. In this paper, the measured turbulence data are processed and analyzed in time domain and frequency domain. The shear probes are sensitive to the vibration of the platform. So, the measured turbulence data need to be corrected to improve its accuracy. To analysis the effectiveness of the collected data, power spectra of both the velocity shear and temperature gradient are compared with the theoretical spectra, respectively. Dissipation rate of turbulence kinetic energy ε can be directly estimated by integrating the wavenumber spectrum of the observed shear. Furthermore, by fitting the observed temperature gradient variance spectra to the Batchelor theoretical forms, an indirect measurement of ε T is obtained. Here, the temperature-derived dissipation rates ε T are compared to the shear-derived results ε. The dissipation rates from the above two independent methods agree to within a factor of 10 on average in a wide range of 10 −10 –10 −7 W/kg. Thus, turbulence estimation using free-fall vertical profiler confirmed to be valid, which extends possibility to obtain much more turbulence data in deep and wide oceans.