| Summary: | Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2011. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011): C12010, doi:10.1029/2011JC007054. The unstructured-grid, Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) was used to simulate the tides in the Gulf of Maine (GoM) and New England Shelf (NES) for homogeneous and summer stratified conditions. FVCOM captures the near-resonant nature of the semidiurnal tide and energy flux in the GoM and the complex dynamics governing the tide in the NES. Stratification has limited impact on tidal elevation, but can significantly modify the tidal current profile. Internal tides are energetic in the stratified regions over steep bottom topography, but their contribution to the total tidal energy flux is only significant over the northeast flank of Georges Bank. The model suggests that the tidal flushing-induced eddy east of Monomoy Island is the dynamic basis for the locally observed phase lead of the M2 tide. The southward propagating tidal wave east of Cape Cod encounters the northeastward propagating tidal wave from the NES south of Nantucket Island, forming a zone of minimum sea level along a southeast-oriented line from Nantucket Island. These two waves are characterized by linear dynamics in which bottom friction and advection are negligible in the momentum balance, but their superposition leads to a strong nonlinear current interaction and large bottom stress in the zone of lowest sea elevation. This research is supported by the U.S. GLOBEC Northwest Atlantic/Georges Bank Program NSF (OCE-0234545, 0227679, 0606928, 0726851 and 0814505) to Changsheng Chen and Qixchun Xu and NSF grant (OCE-02-27679) and the WHOI Smith Chair to Robert Beardsley and Richard Limeburner. The tidal model-data comparison on Nantucket Sound/Shoals is partially the result of research sponsored by the MIT Sea Grant College Program, under NOAA grant ...
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