Publication Date:
2023-08-02
Description:
Tides are a crucial factor in the development and characteristics of coastal zones, as well as human activity in these zones. They (i) regulate navigation into and out of ports, (ii) set national and international boundary lines, (iii) are an important factor in the vertical zoning of tidal ecosystems, and (iv) affect the severity and frequency of coastal flooding. As a result, understanding and predicting how tides have changed in the past and how they will change in the future is of utmost practical and scientific importance. Nineteen years ago, the last comprehensive assessment of mean tidal range (MTR) changes across the United States was completed by Flick et al. (2003). As part of the NASA Sea Level Change Team, we are currently updating and extending the assessment temporally to present day and spatially to 120 NOAA tide gauge records, each with 19 or more years of data. We assess the inter-annual to decadal variability, long-term trends, and spatial characteristics of the MTR. Large heterogeneous variability caused by complex coastlines, including numerous estuaries and barrier islands, is found in the tide gauge records. In an attempt to identify coherent large-scale oceanic changes in MTR, we first build coastal indices by grouping time-series with similar variability. Subsequently, these coastal indices are then used to separate more localized changes in individual MTR time-series. In this presentation, we will discuss a variety of case study examples providing an overview of how MTR has been changing spatially and temporally since the late 19〈sup〉th〈/sup〉 century.
Language:
English
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject
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