Arctic Ocean Level Trends

E. E. Lemeshko*, E. М. Lemeshko

Marine Hydrophysical Institute of RAS, Sevastopol, Russia

* e-mail: e.lemeshko@mhi-ras.ru

Abstract

The Arctic plays a significant role in the Earth’s climate system and the purpose of this article is to analyze peculiarities of variability of the Arctic Ocean level and to compare it with that of the World Ocean level. According to altimetry data for the period of 1993–2018 an estimate of the World Ocean level trend of 3.15 ± 0.2 mm/year with a 68 % confidence interval was obtained. Whereas an increase in the linear trend of 0.8 mm / year for the period 2004–2015 should be noted in comparison with 1993–2004. Estimation of the linear trend of the World Ocean barystatic level is 2.13 ± 0.12 mm/year with a 68 % confidence interval for the period 2002–2018, and the steric level trend is 1.02 mm/year, which is consistent with estimates of other authors obtained by independent methods. The linear trends of the Arctic Ocean barystatic level are calculated for the period 2002–2015 and compared with estimates of the linear trend of the World Ocean level and its steric component. The processes of variability of the barystatic level in the Norwegian, Barents and Arctic seas of Russia are mainly seasonal and intra-seasonal in nature, the contribution of interannual variability is less than 20–30 %; in the East Siberian, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, the contribution of interannual variability reaches 50 %; processes in the region of Greenland are characterized mainly by interannual variability, which makes 70–90 % of the contribution to the total variance of the barystatic level.

Keywords

GRACE, altimetry, level, barystatic level, steric level, level trends, Arctic Ocean

Acknowledgments

The research is performed under project No. 18-05-60083 and funded by the RFBR.

For citation

Lemeshko, E.E. and Lemeshko, E.М., 2020. Arctic Ocean Level Trends. Ecological Safety of Coastal and Shelf Zones of Sea, (2), pp. 28–40. doi:10.22449/2413-5577-2020-1-28-40 (in Russian).

DOI

10.22449/2413-5577-2020-2-28-40

References

  1. Church, J.A. and White, N.J., 2011. Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century. Surveys in Geophysics, 32(4–5), pp. 585–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1
  2. Malinin, V.N., Gordeeva, S.M. and Shevchuk, O.I., 2007. Variability of the Global Sea Level for the Past 140 Years. In: RSHU, 2007. Proceedings of the Russian State Hydrometeorological University. Saint Petersburg: RSHU Publishers. No. 4, pp. 125–131 (in Russian).
  3. Llovel, W., Purkey, S., Meyssignac, B., Blazquez, A., Kolodziejczyk, N. and Bamber, J., 2019. Global Ocean Freshening, Ocean Mass Increase and Global Mean Sea Level Rise over 2005–2015. Scientific Reports, 9, 17717. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-54239-2
  4. Chambers, D.P., Cazenave, A., Champollion, N., Dieng, H., Llovel, W., Forsberg, R., von Schuckman, K. and Wada, Y., 2017. Evaluation of the Global Mean Sea Level Budget between 1993 and 2014. Surveys in Geophysics, 38(1), pp. 309–327. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-016-9381-3
  5. Wiese, D.N., Landerer, F.W. and Watkins, M.M., 2016. Quantifying and Reducing Leakage Errors in the JPL RL05M GRACE Mascon Solution. Water Resources Research, 52(9), pp. 7490–7502. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019344
  6. Belokopytov, V.N., 2017. Factors Reducing Efficiency of the Operational Oceanographic Forecast Systems in the Arctic Basin. Physical Oceanography, (2), pp. 19–24. https://doi.org/10.22449/1573-160X-2017-2-19-24
  7. Wahr, J., Molenaar, M. and Bryan, F., 1998. Time Variability of the Earth’s Gravity Field: Hydrological and Oceanic Effect and their Possible Detection Using GRACE. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 103(B12), pp. 30205–30229. https://doi.org/10.1029/98JB02844
  8. Ponte, R.M., 1999. A Preliminary Model Study of the Large-Scale Seasonal Cycle in Bottom Pressure over the Global Ocean. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 104(C1), pp. 1289–1300. https://doi.org/10.1029/1998JC900028
  9. Peralta-Ferriz, C., Landerer, F.W., Chambers, D.P., Volkov, D. and Llovel, W., 2017. Remote Sensing of Bottom Pressure from GRACE Satellites. US CLIVAR Variations, 15(2), pp. 22–28.
  10. Ablain, M., Meyssignac, B., Zawadzki, L., Jugier, R., Ribes, A., Spada, G., Benveniste, J., Cazenave, A. and Picot, N., 2019. Uncertainty in Satellite Estimates of Global Mean Sea-Level Changes, Trend and Acceleration. Earth System Science Data, 11(3), pp. 1189–1202. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1189-2019
  11. Dieng, H.B., Cazenave, A., Meyssignac, B. and Ablain, M., 2017. New Estimate of the Current Rate of Sea Level Rise from a Sea Level Budget Approach. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(8), pp. 3744–3751. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL073308
  12. Svendsen, P.L., Andersen, O.B. and Nielsen, A.A., 2016. Stable Reconstruction of Arctic Sea Level for the 1950–2010 Period. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 121(8), pp. 5697–5710. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JC011685
  13. Rose, S.K., Andersen, O.B., Passaro, M., Ludwigsen, C.A. and Schwatke, C., 2019. Arctic Ocean Sea Level Record from the Complete Radar Altimetry Era: 1991–2018. Remote Sensing, 11(14), 1672. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11141672

Full text

English version (PDF)

Russian version (PDF)