<p>Accurate and timely predictions from operational forecast systems are crucial for disaster response planning during extreme weather events. Many of these forecast systems utilize unstructured mesh representations to model seafloor topography and discretize the domain. The size of the bathymetric mesh can significantly impact the runtime performance of these systems. Mesh simplification is a technique used to reduce the number of elements composing a mesh while preserving desired characteristics, such as shape and topology. Reducing the overall size of the mesh can improve the performance of any subsequent simulations performed on the mesh. In this work, vertex removal and re-triangulation operations are used to simplify a bathymetric surface model. Differences in resulting vertical offset from the original mesh and a maximum triangle area constraint are used to identify candidate vertices for elimination. Identical two-dimensional (2D) depth-averaged barotropic tidal simulations are modelled on the original and each simplified mesh. Velocity direction, velocity magnitudes, and water levels are recorded at twelve sites in New York Harbor over time. It was demonstrated that the simplified mesh derived from using even the strictest parameters for the mesh simplification was able to reduce the overall mesh size by approximately 26.81%, which resulted in a 26.38% speed improvement percentage compared to the un-simplified mesh. Reduction of the overall mesh size was dependent on the parameters for simplification and the speed improvement percentage was relative to the number of resulting elements composing the simplified mesh.</p>