[wanderinghogan]

It's wild how locally variable the sea level surface is. I worked on a study that incorporated local sea levels into a bath-tub style sea level rise model that that also incorporated storm surge using ADCIRC modeling, and we tried to account for local land subsidence and uplift rates... anyways.

If you look at the "NOAA Tides and Currents" data, and go to Maryland, and click two points across the Chesapeake bay from each other. Go to More Data > Datum, you can see just across a 20 mile stretch of bay, Bishops Head MD MHHW (Mean Higher High Water, when there are two daily high tides, this is the elevation of the higher of the two) is 2.06 Feet over the vertical datum, while 20 miles away at Solomons Island MD it's a half foot lower, 1.48 Ft.

[balderdash]

On a smaller body of water is that mostly wind?