| Accurate prediction of sea level and sea current is of significant importance for a large variety of issues affecting coastal residents and businesses. Tidal height and tidal current predictions are published by the National Ocean Service. However, wind forces may cause significant deviation from the sea level tidal predictions. According to sea level measurements in the Delaware Bay, wind events can cause a surface height difference of up to 1 m.; Within the past several years, estuarine observing systems have been established along the east coast of the United States. The Delaware estuary is observed by three such systems; which provide the 24 weather stations used for the study presented in this thesis. To analyze the relationship between the wind and subtidal sea level/current, a database populated with historical wind observations is established. The time range of this database is from January 2003 through May 2005. The observed data is limited by the sparse distribution of the weather stations and by temporal gaps. Accordingly, spatial and temporal interpolation is implemented. The best linear unbiased estimator; given by the Universal Kriging method, is chosen for the spatial interpolation. The temporal gaps are interpolated by the Modified Covariance method. The temporal model is autoregressive with the order estimated by the Akaike's criterion.; Overview plots are provided, which visualize the availability of data for a station at a given time point. With this more complete data set and an accurate spatial wind field interpolation, the relationship between the wind and subtidal sea level/current in the Delaware estuary can be analyzed. |
