The Texas Coastal Ocean Observation Network (TCOON) operates about 60 platforms along the coast of Texas collecting water level measurements as well as other meteorological parameters such as wind speed, wind direction, and barometric pressure. Tidal forecasts are however only available for the small number of stations for which the National Ocean Service (NOS) provides tidal constituents. Harmonic Constituents are often not published as there are many factors which cause water level to deviate from tidal predictions. However, there is a great need to be able to obtain Harmonic Constituents for various pertinent research projects.

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Conrad Blucher Institute has developed the TexasTide and Consts programs to provide tidal forecasts for most of its stations and to make the process of generating tidal constituents and tidal forecasts more readily accessible. The Consts program implements NOS's Harmonic Method to compute constituents from reliable data sets. To calculate constituents, data sets need to be dependable water level readings of at least one recent year for the target station. TexasTide utilizes the constituents derived by Consts to provide water level predictions. The programs are written in Perl/PDL(Perl Data Language), PDL being a Perl module used for matrix based numeric calculations.

The poster presentation will describe the development of software to compute Tidal forecasts and Tidal constituents by means of Harmonic Analysis based on reliable observed data. The presentation will include comparisons between tidal forecasts computed with TexasTide, Xtide, and CO-OPS predictions. The constituents computed by Consts will also be compared with the constituents published by NOS. Finally, observed water levels will be compared with the tidal forecasts computed with TexasTide.