Contribution of regional climate drivers to future winter sea-level changes in the Baltic Sea estimated by statistical methods and simulations of climate models

摘要

A statistical downscaling approach is applied to the output of five different global climate model simulations driven by twenty-first century future scenarios of greenhouse gas concentrations The contribution of sea-level pressure (SLP) and precipitation changes to regional future winter sea-level changes is estimated for four Baltic sea-level stations by establishing statistical relationships between sea level as predictand and large-scale climate fields as predictors Using SLP as predictor for the central and eastern Baltic Sea level stations, three climate models lead to statistically significant twenty-first century future trends in the range of the order of 1-2 mm/year Using precipitation as predictor for the stations in the southern Baltic coast all five models lead to statistically significant trends with a range of the order of 0 4 mm/year These numbers are smaller, but of the order of magnitude as the predicted global sea-level rise