Implementation of Tidal Constituent Interpolation Method for the Israeli Coastline

Abstract

Many ship-borne geodetic surveys at sea, such as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based sea surface height (SSH) observation, acoustic profiling of the bottom, and others, deal with a dynamic topography which undergoes several changes during the survey campaign (e.g., changes in tide, salinity and currents). Those changes affect the measurements and may causes for some variations in the results. There are several methods for tidal variations correction, being the most dominant phenomena, such as tidal zoning, tidal constituent interpolation or ocean tidal models. In this study, we have implemented the tidal constituent interpolation method for the Israeli coastline in order to assess its quality and determine whether it is suitable for use in this particular region. This paper depicts the interpolation method, discusses some difficulties in the implementation for the Israeli coast and presents results from exemplary processing. In addition, we compare the results to those obtained using global and regional tidal models.

Keywords:

• Boundary problem
• Laplace's Equation
• sea surface height
• tidal constituents

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Yossi Meltzer, head of the Research Department of the Survey of Israel, and his team for providing us sea level data that were the base of our research. We would also like to thank Ole Roggenbuck from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt for his help with some of the calculations needed for this experiment.