The effect of ocean tide loading on stress and strain in the Earth’s interior

The theory of ocean tide loading computation was introduced in detail, and the load Love numbers and the Green’s functions in the Earth’s interior were computed for the Earth model PREM. Furthermore, the effect of ocean tide loading on strain and stress in the Earth’s interior with different depths were computed at the stations Shanghai and Wuhan as examples. The numerical results show that the depth is a critical factor in the computation. The ocean tide loading effect commonly decreases with the depth increasing for the stations in the near field, whereas the effect is contrary for the stations in the far field. Additionally, the depth affects indeed the phases of the stress and strain tensor components. And the effect over coastal area is larger than that from solid Earth tides. As a result, the ocean tide loading effect must be taken into account in the stress and strain measurements.