People try to predict all kinds of things, from the weather to football scores — all with mixed results. Predictions of one phenomenon are usually pretty accurate: the tides. But getting it right requires good information about many factors.
Predicting tides has always been important to people who look to the sea for their livelihood. Commercial and recreational fishermen use their knowledge of the tides and tidal currents to help them improve their catches. Depending on the species and water depth in a particular area, fish may concentrate during ebb or flood tidal currents.
This of course begs the query “Why monitor the tides and currents?”
The Importance of Monitoring the Tides and Their Currents The ability to predict tides and currents is essential for people who rely on the sea for their livelihood. Marine commerce is one area in which tide and current predictions are critical.
Do tides relate to temperature?
Tides also affect temperature; during high tides, cooler marine waters intrude into warmer coastal areas, the waters mix, and the temperature is lowered. The opposite happens during low tides; warm terrestrial waters (i. e, rivers and streams) flowing into estuaries have a greater influence than they do during high tide, causing the water temperature to increase.
How does the weather affect tides?
Local wind and weather patterns also can affect tides. Strong offshore winds can move water away from coastlines, exaggerating low tide exposures. Onshore winds may act to pile up water onto the shoreline, virtually eliminating low tide exposures.
While reading we ran into the inquiry “What is the relationship between the Moon and tides?”.
One frequent answer is, High and low tides are caused by the moon. The moon’s gravitational pull generates something called the tidal force. The tidal force causes Earth—and its water—to bulge out on the side closest to the moon and the side farthest from the moon. These bulges of water are high tides.
(NOAA National Ocean Service) The word “tides” is used to define the rise and fall in sea level resulting from the gravitational attraction of the moon and the sun.
Here is what we ran into. as these bulges move around Earth, they run into land, causing the water level to rise and fall. So the most important factors in predicting the tides are the positions of the Sun and Moon — their distance from Earth, their direction in space, and how they’re moving. But the most accurate predictions require even more.
When I was reading we ran into the inquiry “What are spring tides and how do they happen?”.
Spring tides happen whenever there is a new moon or a full moon and have nothing to do with the season of spring. (The term comes from the German word springen, which means “to jump.”) In the period between the two spring tides, the moon faces the Earth at a right angle to the sun. When this happens, the pull of the sun and the moon are weak.
A query we ran across in our research was “Why are equinox tides stronger than normal tides?”.
One article argued that tides move around Earth as bulges in the ocean. Does Equinox affect tides? During equinoxes, the Sun exerts a stronger pull on the Earth than the rest of the year, because of the alignment between the sun and the equator. Consequently, the water surface is strongly attracted by the Sun, which accentuates tides, we call them “great tides”.
How accurate are tides and storm surges in predicting the future?
Therefore predicting tides a long way into the future could be less accurate. Storm surges are short term sea level changes caused by the weather (winds and atmospheric pressure) that also affect tidal predictability. Storm surges can only be forecast with the same time horizon as weather forecasting (about two to five days).
How many high tides are there per day?
, and it depends. Most coastal locations have two unequal high tides a day. If the Earth were a perfect sphere without large continents, and if the earth-moon-sun system were in perfect alignment, every place would get two equal high and low tides every day.
Most tides are semidiurnal, which means they take place twice a day. For example, when an area covered by the ocean faces the moon, the moon’s gravitational force on the water causes a high high tide. As the Earth rotates, that area moves away from the moon’s influence and the tide ebbs.