General

The land-sea interaction of water is a complex system crucial for a wide range of biogeochemical phenomena, ranging from compound flooding to feeding patterns to pollution distribution. Ocean tides are a natural phenomenon that plays a significant role in the dynamics of water within the land-ocean continuum. Observing the propagation of ocean tides into inland water systems on a global scale is challenging. The recently launched SWOT satellite provides wide-swath measurements at unprecedented scales, which are aimed at producing water level measurements across all global water bodies. These data have already proved to be particularly useful for the study of ocean tides at fine spatial scales within complex coastal regions, with early results indicating clear avenues for advancement in tidal research, including in inland waters (Hart-Davis et al. 2024).

Tidal constituents are estimated based on the pixel cloud and RiverSP products and validated against in-situ river and tide gauges. Based on these findings, a global atlas of tidal influence is presented for the first time, describing the extent to which tides propagate or influence river systems: https://dahiti.dgfi.tum.de/en/products/river-tides/map/