British Columbia

British Columbia fronts the open Pacific along Canada's west coast, with Vancouver on the lower mainland between the Fraser delta and Burrard Inlet, Vancouver Island shielding the inner waters of the Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea from the open ocean, and the long fjord-cut coast running north to Prince Rupert and the Alaska panhandle. The tide here is a strongly amplified mixed semidiurnal signal — two highs and two lows of distinctly unequal size each day, with the difference between the higher high and the lower low routinely exceeding the difference between the two highs themselves. Mean range at the Vancouver harbour gauge in Burrard Inlet is about 3.1 metres, climbing past 4.5 metres between the lower-low and the higher-high on the largest spring tides and dropping near 2.0 on neaps. The Strait of Georgia funnels the open Pacific signal as it propagates inland from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the further north and east you go inside the basin, the larger the swing. Tidal currents through Seymour Narrows and the Discovery Passage north of Campbell River exceed 15 knots on the spring change of tide and rank among the strongest navigable currents in the world. Stanley Park's intertidal zone at Third Beach and the Lighthouse Park rocks across the inlet open up on the lowest spring lows, and the long sand at Spanish Banks, Locarno, and Jericho widens by 30 metres or more at the bottom of the cycle. The seaplane traffic at Coal Harbour, the SeaBus across to North Vancouver, and the working container terminals at Vanterm and Deltaport all read the table for different windows. The Canadian Hydrographic Service runs the authoritative gauge network and publishes the official tide tables; Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this site.