A study of tides and currents in Cook Strait, New Zealand

Abstract

Greater Cook Strait (GCS) lies between the North and the South Islands of New Zealand. Its location at the convergence of the Pacific and IndoAustralian tectonic plates leads to interesting bathymetry with an adjacent shallow shelf and deep ocean trench as well as numerous crossing faults and complex shoreline geometry. Our purpose in this study is to examine tides and currents in GCS and, in particular, identify the major forcing mechanisms for the residual currents. Toward this end, we use an unstructured-grid numerical model to reproduce the tides and currents, verify these results with observations and then use the model to separate the various forcing mechanisms.

Physical oceanography of the deep seas around New Zealand: a review

“…Much of the advance in tidal research since 1985 has been in the development of tidal models, particularly in the use of an unstructured-grid numerical model to reproduce the barotropic tides and currents (Walters et al 2001(Walters et al , 2010. Stanton (2001) found good agreement between the model and observations for the M 2 and S 2 tides.…”

On the Sediment Dynamics in a Tidally Energetic Channel: The Inner Sound, Northern Scotland

“…It has been tested on a variety of benchmarks against both analytical and experimental data sets (e.g., [25][26][27]). The model has been previously used to investigate the inundation risk from tsunamis and storm surge on the New Zealand coastline [26,28,29], and to study tidal currents in high energy environments [30][31][32]. Here the model was used to study the highly energetic flow through the Pentland Firth.…”

Shellfish farm-induced changes to tidal circulation in an embayment, and implications for seston depletion

“…The model grid used for the present study extends a considerable distance away from the study site (the domain covers ~490 × 210 km) in order to produce realistic flows through Cook Strait which, in turn, influence currents in Pelorus Sound. This also allows the use of boundary conditions found to produce accurate currents through Cook Strait (Walters et al 2010) without resorting to grid nesting. Grid resolution varies from 5-10 km at the off-shore boundaries, becoming progressively finer down to ~200 m in most of Pelorus Sound, and 25-50 m in Port Ligar and Waihinau Bay.…”