Application of the EMD Method to River Tides

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Abstract
A lot of tidal phenomena, including river tides, tides in ice-covered bays, and internal tides in fjords, are nonstationary. These tidal processes present a severe challenge for the conventional tidal analysis method. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is useful for nonstationary and nonlinear time series and has been used for different geophysical data. However, application of EMD to nonstationary tides is rare. This paper is meant to demonstrate a new tidal analysis tool that can help study nonstationary tides, in this case river tides. EMD is applied to a set of hourly water level records on the lower Columbia River, where the tides are greatly influenced by the fluctuating river flow. The results show that the averaged period of any EMD mode almost exactly doubles that of the previous one, suggesting that EMD is a dyadic filter. The highest and second highest frequency modes of EMD represent the semidiurnal (D2) and diurnal (D1) tides, respectively. The sum of the EMD modes except for the first two is the mean water level (MWL). The study finds that the EMD method successfully captured the nonstationary characteristics of the D1 tides, the D2 tides, and the MWL induced by river flow.
Funding Information
  • National Key Research and Development Plan (2016YFC1402304)
  • Key Research and Development Plan of Shandong Province (2016ZDJS09A02)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (41606006)

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