Title: Characteristics of seasonal changes of the Baltic Sea extreme sea levels

Study:
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0078323422000239?token=709B6EA298EA0CD3A2299391C
B4AA8F94DE8A4D6396A2893155A2674A083C2E8AFF8D1E5625A2D1FB91079DE059AB477&originRegio
n=us-east-1&originCreation=20220510080945

SEASONAL AND LONG TERM FLUCTUATIONS

Causes of Sea level Change. Sea level changes on a range of temporal also known as time-related and
spatial scales. The total volume of the ocean can change as a result of changes in ocean mass or
expansion or contraction of the ocean water as it warms/cools.

Records from NASA as displayed in the figure track the sea level change from 1993 as observed by
satellite showing a recorded rise of 102.3 millimeters. The second graph, derived from coastal tide gauge
and satellite data, shows how much sea level changed from about 1900 to 2018. Items with pluses (+)
are factors that cause global mean sea level to increase, while minuses (-) are variables that cause sea
levels to decrease. These items are displayed at the time they were affecting sea level.

These changes may be classified under short term, seasonal to decadal, and longer term. For Short term
changes, they are those processes that can happen in hours to days such as waves, storm surges and
tsunamis. In longer terms, these are those on time scales of atleast months, resulting from change in
ocean mass (by means of addition of water to ocean from land) and expansion/contraction of ocean
water as it warms and cools. For our related study, we focus more on the seasonal changes.

Under temporal conditions are seasonal changes. This results from the annual warming/cooling cycle- in
each hemisphere, with manifestation of the warming and expansion of oceans in the summer while it
cools and contract in the winter. Some variations are driven by latitudinal weather patterns moving in
the ocean-atmosphere system which produce changes in currents, eventually leading to sea level
change.

Now going back, the study by Tomas Wolski, and Bernard Wisniewski, analyzed the monthly spatial
distribution of extreme sea levels inn the Baltic Sea as well as the relationship of these levels with the
NAO and AO indicators.

NAO stands for North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is characterized by a dipole in the sea level pressure
field with one anomaly center over the Arctic, near Greenland, and another center of opposite sign
across the midlatitude sector of the North Atlantic Ocean. In terms of sensible climate, the NAO is
associated with a seesaw pattern in temperature and precipitation between northern Europe and
Greenland. (Wanner and others, 2003)

For sometime the NAO had been mainly thought of as a pattern of variability limited in extent to the
North Atlantic sector. However, Thompson and Wallace (1998) argued that the NAO was, in fact, a
regional manifestation of a hemispheric-wide pattern of variability referred to as the Arctic Oscillation
(AO) or the annular mode (Thompson et al. 2000).

The research was based on hourly sea level data from the 45 tide gauge stations gathered in the years
1960 to 2020. The analysis shows that the duration of extreme sea levels tends to increase moving from
along the line joining the open sea and the gulf end. This is associated with the narrowing of the gulf and
the geomorphological and bathymetric configuration of the coastal zone.

The duration of high and low sea levels in the Baltic Sea decreases from a maximum in January to a
minimum in the months of May to August, then it increases again until the end of the year. This cycle
corresponds well to the annual occurrence of storm surges, which are affected by the annual changes in
atmospheric circulation.

The impact of the variations of the circulation on extreme sea levels was confirmed by examining the
relation between maximum, minimum and mean levels of the Baltic waters and the zone circulation
indices NAO and AO for each month of the year and the seasons in the multiyear period 1960-2020. The
results indicate that the strongest correlations exist between sea levels and NAO/AO in the winter
months. There is a spatial differentiation of the correlation and its increase from the southwest to the
northeast in Baltic Sea.