Re: Tidal bulges

[David Dockstader <DRDOCK00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>]

On Mon, 01 Jul 1996 21:48:06 -0600 Jim Green said:
> Now, Ari, you still want to view the tides as a Moon frequency bulge-like
> thing rattling the oceans and causing tides -- bouncing off the continents
> and islands, etc., but I don't see that that view is as clear as picturing a
> multi-frequency driving force acting on various weakly coupled complicated
> damped harmonic oscillators.
Unlike the problem of pushing the girl on the swing where you can push as
hard as you want any time that you want, the tides are stuck with something
like NOAA's 63 term equation, where as Dan and Dave B have pointed out only
two terms have sufficient amplitude contribute significantly to the tides.
This was my point with the plucked string analogy. What starts out as a

fairly simple driving force produces a much more complex result.

> The largest tidal ranges are found in the bays, gulfs, and estuaries of the
> oceans where *resonance* occurs!!!  And the tides at these places have no
> synchronization with the Moon/Sun positions -- the Svern (England) Estuary
> and the Bay of Funday (Canada) are cases in point.
Things do not have to be in synchronization to be related.  Even if a
relationship is so complicated that we don't immediately recognize it
that doesn't mean that it isn't there.

> I think I need to plot the Moon/Sun net force along with the tide at various
> points to prove this point.  It will take a while to get all the constants
> from NOAA - Maybe this program I just downloaded (FastTide) will make the
> point -- give me a few days.
This should prove very interesting.  I don't expect anything like a straight
line, but I do expect a periodic function.