INVESTIGATING SHORT AND LONG-TERM VARIATIONS IN KING TIDE HEIGHTS ALONG THE OREGON COAST

The King Tides was intended to investigate the changes in water heights during reported King Tide events measured at coastal Oregon tidal stations. Initially a collaboration within Southwestern’s STEAM Pathways Experimental & Academic Research (SPEAR) Team. The project follows a very basic pathway to determining what was a King Tide in years past and how have the heights varied over time. We do this through a developed algorithm to extract data from comma-separated value (CSV) files, determine the mean and standard deviation of the observed tidal data with those calculations solved, we used graphical distributions to determine when King Tides, defined as tides exceeding three standard deviations above the mean high tide height, happened and the time of year. We present here calculations from our initial analysis of Charleston, OR tidal station data with future applications to longer historical lookback and investigations of geographical variance while taking into account what were storm swells and which were tides.