After I completed the animated tidal water surface elevation plots for the Delaware Estuary, I looked for other systems with a good set of tidal observation stations.  The Lower Columbia River near Portland, Oregon fit the bill.  Using the NOAA PORTS stations, I set up near real-time animated plots of the Columbia.  Throughout December 2015, this plot showed some interesting results.

At the beginning of December, the observed and predicted water surface elevations are in pretty good agreement.  But, with high flows upstream, the observed water surface elevations rose well above the predicted, especially upstream, and remained high until January 2016.  One of the observation stations went offline temporarily around December 19th.

The above plot was created using R in R Studio and the animation library.