User talk:Junckerg

Hello, Junckerg! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! Crowsnest (talk) 15:58, 4 June 2009 (UTC) Getting started A tutorial • Our five pillars • Getting mentored How to: edit a page • upload and use images Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Getting help Frequently asked questions • Tips Where to ask questions or make comments Request administrator attention Policies and guidelines Neutral point of view • No original research Verifiability • Reliable sources • Citing sources What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Manual of Style • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Policy for non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The community Build consensus • Resolve disputes Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • No legal threats Community portal • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Writing articles Be bold in editing • Develop an article The perfect article • Manual of style Stubs • Categories • Disambiguation Pages needing attention • Peer review Miscellaneous User name • User pages • Talk pages Clean up: General • Spam • Vandalism Join a WikiProject • Translation Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

Tide

Welcome Junckerg. Thank you for your additions to Tide. These contain several claims regarding the relationship between the Moon's altitude and tides along the US coast. One of the core pillars of Wikipedia is verifiability by reliable sources. And the proof lies by the editor inserting the material (see WP:PROVEIT). Can you add inline citations to your edits backing up the claims made? That would be of great help. Otherwise, some might question the claims and dispute them, or even remove the material. Best regards, Crowsnest (talk) 15:58, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I see I am a bit late with my welcome :) but welcome anyway. -- Crowsnest (talk) 16:00, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Hello Crowsnest. I had never seen an authoritative source, and assumed one didn't exist, but looking in response to your comment I came across a Wiki entry on "Lunitidal Interval". I will add that (perhaps inartfully, I am just a beginner). I will also correct the entry about Florida, which I extrapolated (always dangerous) based on my familiarity with NY and VA tides, and their consistency with the amphidromic principle. It turns out that some other resonations are affecting FL, and the relationship is not as I had stated. Junckerg (talk) 14:19, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I should have added that I can offer up two websites with illustrative data that confirm the relationship between Norfolk tide and moon altitude. http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/4195.html gives you tide times for Norfolk harbor, and http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=23501 gives you (in the lower lefthand corner) moonrise and moonset. If you are looking at today's (June 5 2009) screens, you will see that high tide is at 8:56 PM. Moonrise is 6:50 PM and moonset is 3:52 AM, so total elapsed time is 9 hours and the moon will therefore be overhead 4.5 hours after moonrise, or 11:20 PM. These data confirm that high tide occurs approximately two and a half hours before the moon pases overhead.

The data for NY Harbor can be found at http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/4133.html

But it seems to me these are not the sort of references would be useful to Wikipedia readers (?)

Junckerg (talk) 14:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

References from a more authoritative source would of course be nicer. How about this one, for the general relation between Moon phase and corresponding tide components: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/Understanding_Tides_by_Steacy_finalFINAL11_30.pdf, which I found from this Google search. Best regards, Crowsnest (talk) 19:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The NOAA pamphlet is wonderful, and has an elegance of style that is regrettably rarely found in modern technical writing. My concern about referring to it is that it might tend to reinforce a very common misconception. I my experience, the vast majority of people, including scientists, and even many scientists who are sailors, have a simplified concept of tides that is derived from a figure in their gradeschool textbook, reproduced as Figure 2 in the Wikipedia article and also used the basis for the explanation in the NOAA pamphlet. They expect that the high tide will be rougly identical in time with the moon's transit, and higher between the tropics than at the poles. If the authoritative source does not also describe, indeed emphasize, the more complex resonance phenomena that give rise to amphidromic points and cotidal lines--as Wikipedia does but the NOAA pamphlet does not--I fear it would reinforce the misconception rather than dispel it.

My addition was intended to use a concete example to reinforce the visualization of the counterclockwise rotation of the cotidal lines in the North Atlantic basin, and to highlight the "counterintuitive" (if you uase the oversimplified model) fact that high tides along the northeast US coast are actually a few hours *ahead* of the moon's passage, rather than coterminous or perhaps lagging a little as the oversimplified model would predict. So, maybe an online tide table and astronomical table for the moon would be suitable "authoritative sources"?

Junckerg (talk) 03:08, 6 June 2009 (UTC)