In recent years sea surface elevations in forward global tide models–that is, global tide models that are unconstrained by observations as they run–have become much more accurate. This allows us to examine a number of interesting questions, for instance: 1) do coastal tides have a “back-effect” on open-ocean tides? 2) how would tides respond to changes in sea level, oceanic thermal structure (stratification) or other environmental changes? We have published simulations of the ice-age tides, argued that the simulation results suggest a role for tides in Heinrich events, and quantified the “back-effect” of coastal tides upon open-ocean tides. The back-effect helps to explain the larger tides of ice ages, during which sea level was 50-130 meters lower than it is today, thus eliminating many present-day areas of large coastal tides. We have also explored the impact of more recent sea-level rise on tidal changes observed over the last century. We have also explored the problem of Earth/Moon/ocean tide evolution on billion-year time scales. For the latter topic we coupled realistic ocean tide models to realistic models of the lunar orbit; much previous work used simplified models of either the ocean tides or the lunar orbit.

Our research focuses on the use of numerical models to better understand the dynamics and energy budgets of both wind- and tidally-forced flows in the ocean.

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