Prediction and analysis of tides and tidal currents

Jian-Jun Shu

Published 2014-02-18, updated 2014-03-09Version 2

An efficient algorithm of tidal harmonic analysis and prediction is presented in this paper. Some conditions are found by means of the known approximate relationships between the harmonic constants of the tidal constituents. A system of linear equations for least squares solutions under these restricted conditions is obtained. In the case of inadequate data, ill conditioning in the system of equations that has appeared in other algorithms is conveniently avoided. In solving the resultant normal equations, the Goertzel iteration is adopted so that the whole computation time is dramatically reduced.