Oceanic Tides Exploration

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I decided to focus this Mathematical Exploration on the math behind oceanic tides. I began by looking at the generic possibilities set out by my teacher. Among them was the idea of math being applied to water. In my initial search I found nothing that seemed interesting to me, however, I wanted to stick to the broad topic of water. After continued search I decided to focus on a subject important to me the ocean, specifically oceanic tides. Every year my family takes a trip to California for a week at the beach and since I was a little kid I was perplexed that the water would come up the beach at night and recede during the day. As I grew older and I learned this movement was called the tide and was caused by the moon and the sun’s gravity affecting the ocean. Thus I decided to take the exploration as a chance to further my knowledge of this subject and tides became my subject for this.
I thus decided to explore geographical and gravitational effects on tides along with solar and lunar tides and finally predicting the tides.
With the 39% of Americans living in counties on the shore line of the ocean, tides are forces of nature that many people deal with on a day-to-day basis. But what do we know about the tides? We know that the tides are the rising and falling of the ocean levels because of the gravitational pull from the sun and moon. There are also generally four tides in a day two lunar tides and two solar tides.
In order to explore the tides one must first deduce the big ideas needed to understand them. These include factors that can affect the tides such as the geography of an area and gravitational pulls. Also a separate look at solar and lunar tides will be taken. Finally tidal predictions will be taken under consideration...

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...e highest and lowest tides occur when h’(t)=0
Using this we can predict that the lowest tide of the first week occurred at t_min= 124.58 hrs and h(t_min) = −0.86 ft. This predicts there is a low tide at 4:35 am on Sept. 6 of -.86 ft. The actual low tide occurred at 3:35 am on Sept. 6 of -1.0 ft. The prediction was off by 60 minutes and 0.14 ft. Using the same process we can predict the highest tide of the first week. Here we get the max occurring at t_max= 142.56 hrs and h(t_max) = 6.40 ft or Sept. 6 at 10:33 pm with a height of 6.4 ft. The actual is a tide of 6.7 ft at 9:36 pm on Sept. 6. This time we were off by 0.3 ft and 57 minutes off. This model proved to not be 100% accurate, however, only 4 cosine functions were used to predict the tides while most models use up to 12 and the addition of more functions and parameters would create more accurate predictions.

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