Metrological Analysis of Geopotential Gravity Field for Harbor Waterside Management and Water Quality Control

Abstract

Sea level oscillations are the superposition of many contributions. In particular, tide is a sea level up-down water motion basically depending on three different phenomena: the Earth-Moon-Sun gravitational relationship, the water surface fluid reaction to atmospheric meteorological dynamic, and the Newtonian vertical adjustment of the sea surface due to atmospheric pressure variations. The first tide component (astrotide) is periodic and well known in all points of the Earth surface; the second one is directly related to the meteorological phenomenon, and then it is foreseeable; the Newtonian component, on the contrary, is not readily predictable by a general hydrostatic law, because the 𝐽 factor that represents the Newtonian transfer (from the atmospheric weight to the consequent sea level) is variable in each harbor area.The analysis of the gravity field permits to forecast the sea level variation due to meteorological tide events, and itsmetrological analysis highlights a compensation in the inverse hydrobarometric factor to be taken into account to correctly compensate atmospheric pressure variations in semibinding basins. This phenomenon has several consequences in HarborWaterside management and in water quality control as shown by the reported case studies and introduces a new reference parameter: the so-calledWater 1000.