Short-term ocean tidal parameters estimated from high-rate buoy GNSS data

Ocean tides are significant factors affecting sea surface fluctuations and changes in ocean circulation. Real-time and accurate estimation of tidal parameters is crucial. This paper presents a convenient, fast, accurate, and low-cost method for short-term tidal parameter estimation. The methodology utilizes kinematic Precise Point Positioning (PPP) to determine the height of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) antennas mounted on buoys, integrating the XGM2019e_2159 model and wavelet analysis for baseline transformation and denoising. This process yields the orthometric height sequence of the measurement point’s water level. Subsequently, harmonic analysis is employed to estimate ocean tidal parameters over periods of 16, 8, and 4 days. In addition, the 16-day period ocean tidal parameters are used to predict water levels. Finally, the results are compared with the pressure tide gauge, the FES2022 model and the EOT20 model, indicating that the ocean tidal parameters and predicted water levels closely match the reference values, with differences in amplitudes and phases within ± 5 cm and ± 8° for the 8-day and 4-day periods. This demonstrates that the proposed method effectively reflects short-term tidal information and characteristics.