Shanghai Municipality

Shanghai Municipality sits at the mouth of the Yangtze River delta, where the Wusong River meets the Huangpu before the combined flow reaches the Yangtze main channel and the open East China Sea. The administrative boundary wraps the entire urban area of Shanghai plus Chongming Island, the large alluvial island in the Yangtze estuary north of the city. The tide here is semidiurnal: two highs and two lows each day of broadly comparable size, with a mean range at the Wusong gauge of approximately 2.0 to 2.5 metres at the river mouth. Spring tides around new and full moons push the range toward 3.0 metres; neap tides during quarter moons compress it toward 1.2 metres. The Wusong gauge, operated by the China Maritime Safety Administration and the National Marine Data and Information Service (NMDIS), is the primary reference point for the Shanghai tidal system and the benchmark against which port operations are scheduled. The Huangpu River is a tidal estuary that reverses direction twice per day — the flood tide pushes upstream past the Bund and the Yangpu Bridge, and the ebb draws it back toward Wusong. Current speeds in the Huangpu channel reach close to two knots at mid-tide on a spring cycle, which is enough to set any vessel crossing the river perceptibly downstream. The Yangtze main channel outside the Wusong confluence is a major commercial shipping artery and carries the highest container-vessel traffic density in the world; tidal current in the Yangtze approaches runs three to four knots on the ebb at spring tide. The China Maritime Safety Administration and NMDIS publish the authoritative tide tables for Shanghai and the Yangtze approaches. Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on TideTurtle pages for this region.