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Understanding the spatial variation of sea level rise in the N orth S ea using satellite altimetry
Author(s) -
Sterlini Paul,
Le Bars Dewi,
de Vries Hylke,
Ridder Nina
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: oceans
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9291
pISSN - 2169-9275
DOI - 10.1002/2017jc012907
Subject(s) - altimeter , satellite , climatology , sea level , satellite altimetry , structural basin , salinity , geology , sea surface temperature , spatial variability , environmental science , oceanography , geodesy , geomorphology , statistics , mathematics , aerospace engineering , engineering
This paper examines the spatial variation of sea surface height trends in the North Sea Basin as seen by satellite altimetry and assesses its underlying causes. Changes in the potential temperature and salinity of the North Sea are transposed into corresponding changes in sea surface height and regional anomalies of linear sea level trend calculated. The same is carried out for the meteorological processes which act on the sea surface. The steric and meteorological regional sea level rise anomalies are summed with those from contributions from land ice and compared against the values seen by satellite altimetry over the period 1993–2014. Results show that there is good agreement between the observations and the reconstruction. The local meteorological contribution appears to be most important in describing regional variation in linear sea level rise and is reinforced with a local halosteric contribution which shows a similar spatial pattern.