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Hi Dong,

I agree with your hypothesis that the sea tide directly influences the water level of the Hudson River because they’re interconnected. It simply makes sense that sea flow affects the water level of the Hudson River.

However, I believe that another layer of complexity can be added by factoring the moon cycles and what part of the month we’re in at a given point in time. The moon directly affects the tides by exerting its gravitational force onto Earth. Therefore, depending on our rotating position relative to the distance to Moon, the tides will be weaker or stronger.

However, I don’t know the specific stages in the moon cycle and I’m sure there are further geometrical intricacies to the moon’s gravitational force to explore.

I also wondered what other factors could contribute to water levels, maybe considering human utilization impact rate on daily basis. And along those same lines, how to accurately track human water usage rates for such a large city.

I’d love to delve deeper into this topic.

Best,

Owen

Greetings Dong,

I really like how seemingly-random the question is for how specific it is, it’s really interesting when taking the role as a scientist to ask questions about specific cases, not just the grander scale questions so it’s really cool that you did that.

Indeed, the hypothesis is very logical and very adjacent to the subject of the question you’re asking, though I do wonder if on top of the ocean, which is a factor directly or indirectly, what other factors may be at play. I wonder if at night more ships are docked in the river and their displacement changes the level, or if sewers are dumped at night. Either way, I think its the start of a very cool question to consider which requires very local observations and evidence and has practical potential as well: perhaps the hydroelectric plants in the river can take in more volume than usual at night, or some other effect which we can take advantage of.

Nitay