Home » Services » Oceanographic » Water Levels & Tides

Water Level & Tides

OSI employs a wide variety of instrumentation to measure water elevation in lakes, rivers, and oceans. While astronomic tides are the most common driving force behind water level changes, water levels can also change due to environment conditions such as wind setup, dam releases, evaporation, rainfall, and runoff.

Today’s hydrographic surveys are most often vertically controlled by employing RTK GNSS or IAPPK techniques. OSI has a substantial inventory of state-of-the-art GNSS hardware (and processing software) used to realize precision water level measurements for hydrographic surveys.

OSI has supported various clients’ water level studies (including NOAA and the USACE) via water level recording, installation of permanent survey control (disks, deep rod marks, etc), precise leveling, and acquisition of GNSS observables for determination of ellipsoid-referenced elevations.

Representative Projects

Power Generation and Distribution: Puerto Cortes, Honduras

Ocean Surveys performed a multi-disciplined marine investigation including hydrographic, geophysical, oceanographic, meteorological and biological studies in the waters off Puerto Cortes in the Gulf of Honduras. This investigation was conducted to collect scientific data in support of the design of ...
Read More

Tide Monitoring: Southport, Connecticut

Ocean Surveys completed one-month deployments of water level recorders at two tide-monitoring stations on the Sasco Creek in Southport, Connecticut. The tidal fluctuations in the Sasco Creek were unique in that water levels in the creek only increased when tidal ...
Read More