A comparative study between geostrophic currents and directly measured currents was conducted for the upper layer to 200 m depth by using data from eleven observations of CTD and ADCP between March 1992 and November 1993 in the southwestern part of the East Sea. First-order linear relationship was found between calculated geostrophic currents and measured currents with the correlation coefficient of 0.83. On the average, 68.7% of directly measured current can be explained by geostrophic current obtained by dynamic method. The correlation coeflicients increased with total geostrophic transport, which suggests that geostrophic balance is good in areas of strong current.