No, not for school. My brother dropped by with an odd question he was arguing with his wife over: do lakes, like our town lake, have tides? He said no, they’re too small, she argued yes, albeit small ones.
I google a bit and find that Lake Michigan has a lunar tide of roughly 1 inch, and a volume of 1180 cubic miles. More googling says our local lake has a volume of 74310 acre-feet. A website converter says that equals rougly .02 cubic miles, or 1/59000th the volume of Lake Michigan. So, if Lake Michigan has a tide of 1 inch, our local lake has a tide of 1/59000th of an inch. Is this right?
The Pacific Ocean has a volume of 163 million cubic miles, making it about 138 thousand times the volume of Lake Michigan. This would translate into tides of over 11,000 feet for the Pacific.
I don’t think it’s a simple function of volume like that - amongst other things, it’s going to be affected by the shape of the shoreline and the profile of the bottom. - a long narrow lake that runs north-south will probably experience more tidal movement than a lake of similar size and shape that runs east-west, just because the forces that make tides happen are generally moving along an east-west axis, so there’s more scope for the water to slosh back and forth that way.
AFAIK, fluctuations in water levels that happen to resemble tides in many lakes are caused by winds piling the water up one way or the other - these can occur on quite a regular cycle, as the direction of wind at any given time of the day may be largely affected by the position of the sun and its effect on local terrain, etc.
