In this study the steric height anomaly which is calculated from the hydrological data (EN3) is compared with the sea level anomaly derived from satellite altimetry in the Nordic Seas. The overall pattern of steric height is that it is higher in the margin area and lower in the middle area. The extreme values of steric height linear change from 1993 to 2010 occur in the Lofoten Basin and off the Norwegian coast, respectively. Such a distribution may be partly attributed to the freshening trend of the Nordic Seas. The correlation between SLA (sea level anomaly) and SHA (steric height anomaly) is not uniform over the Nordic Seas. The time series of SLA and SHA agree well in the Lofoten Basin and northern Norwegian Basin, and worse in the northern Norwegian Sea, implying that the baroclinic effect plays a dominant role in most areas in the Norwegian Sea and the barotropic effect plays a dominant role in the northern Norwegian Sea. The weaker correlations between SLA and SHA in the Greenland and Iceland Seas lead a conclusion that the barotropic contribution is significant in these areas. The area-mean SHA over the entire Nordic Seas has similar amplitudes compared with the SLA during 1996–2002, but SHA has become lower than SLA, being less than half of SLA since 2006.
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