Sea-level trends in the Baltic Sea

Birgit Hünicke, Sebastian Wagner, Eduardo Zorita

GKSS Forschungszentrum, Institut für Küstenforschung, Geesthacht, Germany

Email: huenicke@gkss.de

ABSTRACT

In coastal regions and semi-enclosed seas, as the Baltic Sea, atmospheric circulation patterns and other factors may cause deviations from the mean global sea-level trends. For more accurate prediction of the regional sea-level trends, an understanding for the regional sea-level variations at decadal, multi-decadal and centennial timescales is relevant, but the analysis at these timescales is hindered by the lack of long observational time series (sea-level and climatic datasets). To study the regional factors driving sea-level variations in the Baltic Sea back to 1800, long instrumental sea-level records and proxy-based climate reconstructions (Luterbacher et al., 2002, 2004; Pauling et al. 2006) were analysed for the winter and summer season by simple statistical regression analysis to hindcast sea-level variations, examining the skill of different predictors. Additionally, an ensemble of GCM climate simulations for the period 1756-2100 was used to quantify the possible contribution of sea-level pressure and precipitation changes to future Baltic Sea level.

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