What are diurnal tides?

Diurnal tides are the regular up-and-down movements of water that happen once a day, just like when you fill and empty a bucket.

Imagine the ocean is like a big, wobbly bucket. There's something out in space, the Moon, that pulls on it, kind of like when you pull on a string attached to a toy. This pulling makes the water rise up, creating a high tide, and then fall back down, making a low tide.

Now here’s the fun part: the Moon goes all the way around the Earth once every 24 hours and 50 minutes. That’s like walking in a circle around your best friend, it takes just a little longer than a day to make one full loop. Because of that, sometimes you get just one high tide and one low tide each day. That's what we call diurnal tides.

Sometimes the ocean acts more like a bucket with two sides, when the Moon is in a certain spot, it can cause two high tides and two low tides in a day. But that’s another story for later!