It is of practical significance to investigate shallow water tides since there is a vast expanse of shallow sea surrounding our eastern border in the cast. In this paper for the study of tidal waves in shallow water we present a three-dimentional nonlinear model.On the basis of tidal constituent concept, the model designed could be used not only for the detection of astronomical tides but also for different orders of shallow water constituents. For the jth order of constituents (as defined in the present article), the boundary value problems of elliptic differential equations for the tidal elevation are derived; in addition, the analytical expressions of the vertical distribution for tidal currents are deduced.