In the ideal semidiurnal tide model, successive high tides occur after the Earth–Moon relative angle advances by . Since the motions have the same sense, subtract their angular speeds:
The lunar orbital period is sidereal, so the consistent terrestrial rotation period is . With , this gives about 12 h 25 min. The sidereal terrestrial period is distinct from the 24-hour solar day.[ref]
If the Earth's rotation is approximated as one revolution in 24 hours, the same calculation instead gives 12 h 27 min. That small difference is the day convention, not a change of sign in the relative angular speed. Actual coastal tide times also depend on ocean dynamics and the solar tide.
Comparing with the standard wave equation gives the shallow-water wave speed
Twice differentiating the proposed standing wave multiplies its spatial factors by and , and its temporal factor by . It solves the wave equation precisely when
To obtain the local gravitational potential energy, integrate through a water column of height and unit horizontal area:
The time averages are and . Thus
The constant is retained because the specified zero of gravitational potential is the tank bottom. This is local time-averaged potential energy, not the sum of potential energy and kinetic energy.
The no-normal-flow wall conditions are Neumann boundary conditions. Differentiating the cosine factors at the opposite walls gives
Negative integers give the same cosine modes. The formal case has : it is a uniform change of the mean level, not a finite-frequency oscillation. In a closed tank with fixed water volume even that mean-level change is excluded from the oscillatory disturbance.
Since , the lowest finite frequency is the mode :
It is uniform across the shorter direction, has opposite-sign displacement antinodes at the two ends of the longer direction, and a displacement node midway along it.
Figure 1.
Original mode shapes for a closed rectangular tank and an ideal basin with one open end
. Details.
For the open-ended Bay of Fundy model, approximate the ocean mouth as a displacement node and the closed head as an antinode. The fundamental is a quarter-wave basin resonance, so its wavelength is and
Taking a roughly -hour semidiurnal tide gives . Using the principal lunar period of approximately gives . The idealized estimate is therefore about . The lunar period is half of a roughly -hour -minute lunar day.[ref]
This estimate treats the mouth as an ideal open boundary and replaces the real basin by a uniform depth. The supplied large tidal height motivates resonance; it is not enough by itself to determine damping or an amplification factor in this model.
Semidiurnal tide 2026-10-20
A semidiurnal tide has two principal oscillations per day. The dominant lunar constituent has a period of approximately 12 hours 25 minutes; the solar semidiurnal constituent has a period of 12 hours.[ref]