STUDY OF THE IMPACTS OF THE BASIN SCALE SEA LEVEL CHANGES OF THE PACIFIC/INDIAN OCEANS ON THE SOUTH CHINA SEAS BASED ON THE MERGED SATELLITE ALTIMETER PRODUCTS

摘要

The merged satellite altimeter sea level products play an important role in studying the impacts of the basin-scale sea level variations on regional seas. To quantitatively show these impacts, the relationship between the sea level variations of the South China Sea (SCS) and the Pacific/Indian Oceans is investigated in this study, by using AVISO merged Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) products. The Multiple Linear Regression model is mainly used to retrieve the SCS SLA anomaly time series from the mean SLA anomaly time series and the zonal volume centroid anomalies of the Pacific/Indian Oceans. With consideration of the zonal volume centroid anomalies of the upper-layer of the Pacific/Indian Oceans in the regression model, the maximum correlation coefficient between the original mean SLA time series of SCS and the regression result significantly reaches 0.88, which confirms a strong relationship between the regional sea level variations and the non-uniformity of the basin-scale sea level trends.