CoAuthors

Mike Herzfeld (CSIRO, Australia); Mark Hemer (CSIRO, Australia); David Griffin (CSIRO, Australia); Benoit Legresy (CSIRO , Australia)

Being able to predict the tides – both height and velocity – is a high priority for all users of the marine estate, and an essential component of a coastal oceanographer’s toolbox. It is also a key requirement for successfully exploiting altimetry, especially over the continental shelf where de-tiding errors are a first-order problem. This will be especially true for SWOT. With all these factors in mind, CSIRO has developed a new regional tidal model on an unstructured grid with 183810 cells down to 400m in places. Australia has a very diverse tidal regime, with amplitudes ranging from >1m in the NW to near zero in the SW. Tidal current amplitudes in excess of 1m/s occur in places. The model is nested within OTPS and to date has only been tested in barotropic mode. The development cycle included comparisons with observed harmonic constituents from 132 tide gauge sites and 69 current meter sites, with results ranging from excellent to unsatisfactory, for reasons we are still to discover.