Shallow Water Tides in the Seas around Korea

We describe here the shallow water tides in the seas around Korea, obtained from a nonlinear barotropic model of tides in a domain encompassing the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the East Sea (Sea of Japan). As expected, the shallow water tides are large in the shallow marginal areas around the Yellow Sea, with the M4 tide reaching amplitudes as high as 10 cm near the Korean coast, and quite small in the East Sea. However, we also find that the regions east of the Yangtze River ($126^{\circ}E,$ $30^{\circ}N$) in the East China Sea also sustain large shallow water tides, with $M_{4}$, amplitudes reaching 5 cm. Such large shallow water tides are an important component of altimeter-measured sea levels and should not be ignored in any altimetric analyses of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. This study also highlights the desirability of very high resolution models to derive accurate shallow water tides in coastal regions.