A Tidal Constituent Database for the East Coast of Florida

Florida's St. Johns River Water Management District requires tidal constituents (amplitudes and phases) at open water boundaries on the continental shelf from the Florida/Georgia border to Jupiter, Florida. These tidal constituents are used as boundary conditions for hydrodynamic studies on the continental shelf and within estuaries. Since the historical tidal record is limited, this research (the production of the necessary tidal constituents) will result in the improvement of the accuracy of future coastal and estuarine simulations. A significant part of the overall effort was to refine an existing unstructured mesh (Eastcoast2001) of the Western North Atlantic Tidal (WNAT) model domain. The WNAT model domain encompasses the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the North Atlantic Ocean west of the 60° W meridian. Eastcoast2001 has been refined in three distinct areas: near the Florida shoreline, along the eastern Floridan Plateau-edge, and across the continental slope. Refinement is on the order of three in the shallow regions and 10 across the continental rise. The new mesh retains the bathymetric data of Eastcoast 2001 and incorporates more detailed shoreline data. Simulations were performed with a two-dimensional, finite element code for coastal and ocean circulation (ADCIRC-2DDI), which was forced with M₂, M₄, M₆, O₁, N₂, S₂, K₁, and steady constituents. Model verification is demonstrated by comparison of simulation results to historical tidal data.