Oceanographic regional climate projections for the Baltic Sea until 2100

Meier, H. E. Markus; Dieterich, Christian; Gröger, Matthias; Dutheil, Cyril; Börgel, Florian; Safonova, Kseniia; Christensen, Ole; Kjellström, Erik

doi:10.5194/esd-2021-68

Cited by 10 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 110 publications

(237 reference statements)

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“…In Meier et al ( , 2022, global sea level rise was also considered, which is a driver of the Baltic Sea climate variability that was previously neglected (see Arneborg, 2016;Meier et al, 2017). Here, we compare the latest scenario simulation results by Saraiva et al (2019b) with previous projections by Meier et al (2021bMeier et al ( , 2022 for, e.g. SST, sea surface and bottom salinities, sea level (Fig.…”

Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 96%

“…In Sect. 3, the results of the assessment for selected variables (Table 2) under past (palaeoclimate), present (historical period with instrumental data), and future (until 2100) climate conditions are presented, inter alia, by summarising the results in various papers of this special issue by Lehmann et al (2022), Kuliński et al (2021), Rutgersson et al (2022), Weisse et al (2021), Gröger et al (2021a), , Meier et al (2022), and Viitasalo and Bonsdorff (2021) and by other relevant review studies. In Sect.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7. Global climate change (Meier et al, 2022). New projections with a coupled physical-biogeochemical ocean model of future climate, considering global sea level rise, regional climate change, and nutrient input scenarios are compared with previous studies, and the differences are explained by differing scenario assumptions and experimental setups.…”

Section: The Bacc and Bear Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Oceanographic regional climate model projections for the Baltic Sea until 2100, driven by the atmospheric surface fields of the above-mentioned RCSM by , have been developed and analysed by Saraiva et al (2019a, b) and Meier et al (2021aMeier et al ( , 2022. In Meier et al ( , 2022, global sea level rise was also considered, which is a driver of the Baltic Sea climate variability that was previously neglected (see Arneborg, 2016;Meier et al, 2017).…”

Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate change in the Baltic Sea region: a summary

et al. 2022

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Abstract. Based on the Baltic Earth Assessment Reports of this thematic issue in Earth System Dynamics and recent peer-reviewed literature, current knowledge of the effects of global warming on past and future changes in climate of the Baltic Sea region is summarised and assessed. The study is an update of the Second Assessment of Climate Change (BACC II) published in 2015 and focuses on the atmosphere, land, cryosphere, ocean, sediments, and the terrestrial and marine biosphere. Based on the summaries of the recent knowledge gained in palaeo-, historical, and future regional climate research, we find that the main conclusions from earlier assessments still remain valid. However, new long-term, homogenous observational records, for example, for Scandinavian glacier inventories, sea-level-driven saltwater inflows, so-called Major Baltic Inflows, and phytoplankton species distribution, and new scenario simulations with improved models, for example, for glaciers, lake ice, and marine food web, have become available. In many cases, uncertainties can now be better estimated than before because more models were included in the ensembles, especially for the Baltic Sea. With the help of coupled models, feedbacks between several components of the Earth system have been studied, and multiple driver studies were performed, e.g. projections of the food web that include fisheries, eutrophication, and climate change. New datasets and projections have led to a revised understanding of changes in some variables such as salinity. Furthermore, it has become evident that natural variability, in particular for the ocean on multidecadal timescales, is greater than previously estimated, challenging our ability to detect observed and projected changes in climate. In this context, the first palaeoclimate simulations regionalised for the Baltic Sea region are instructive. Hence, estimated uncertainties for the projections of many variables increased. In addition to the well-known influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation, it was found that also other low-frequency modes of internal variability, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability, have profound effects on the climate of the Baltic Sea region. Challenges were also identified, such as the systematic discrepancy between future cloudiness trends in global and regional models and the difficulty of confidently attributing large observed changes in marine ecosystems to climate change. Finally, we compare our results with other coastal sea assessments, such as the North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment (NOSCCA), and find that the effects of climate change on the Baltic Sea differ from those on the North Sea, since Baltic Sea oceanography and ecosystems are very different from other coastal seas such as the North Sea. While the North Sea dynamics are dominated by tides, the Baltic Sea is characterised by brackish water, a perennial vertical stratification in the southern subbasins, and a seasonal sea ice cover in the northern subbasins.

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Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Bacc and Bear Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate change in the Baltic Sea region: a summary

et al. 2022

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“…Wave breaking can transfer a significant amount of energy flux into the ocean (Melville et al, 2002), which mainly affects down to few significant wave height depths from the ocean surface (D'Asaro, 2014). The breaking-wave-induced energy flux is commonly parameterized as an additional input of turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), α CB u 3 , in the surface boundary (Craig and Banner, 1994), where u is the oceanside friction velocity, and α CB is a wave-related parameter that is usually treated as a constant (e.g., 100) without considering the impact of wave status.…”

Section: Ocean-wave-atmosphere Couplingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coupled regional Earth system modeling in the Baltic Sea region

et al. 2021

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Abstract. Nonlinear responses to externally forced climate change are known to dampen or amplify the local climate impact due to complex cross-compartmental feedback loops in the Earth system. These feedbacks are less well represented in the traditional stand-alone atmosphere and ocean models on which many of today's regional climate assessments rely (e.g., EURO-CORDEX, NOSCCA and BACC II). This has promoted the development of regional climate models for the Baltic Sea region by coupling different compartments of the Earth system into more comprehensive models. Coupled models more realistically represent feedback loops than the information imposed on the region by prescribed boundary conditions and, thus, permit more degrees of freedom. In the past, several coupled model systems have been developed for Europe and the Baltic Sea region. This article reviews recent progress on model systems that allow two-way communication between atmosphere and ocean models; models for the land surface, including the terrestrial biosphere; and wave models at the air–sea interface and hydrology models for water cycle closure. However, several processes that have mostly been realized by one-way coupling to date, such as marine biogeochemistry, nutrient cycling and atmospheric chemistry (e.g., aerosols), are not considered here. In contrast to uncoupled stand-alone models, coupled Earth system models can modify mean near-surface air temperatures locally by up to several degrees compared with their stand-alone atmospheric counterparts using prescribed surface boundary conditions. The representation of small-scale oceanic processes, such as vertical mixing and sea-ice dynamics, appears essential to accurately resolve the air–sea heat exchange over the Baltic Sea, and these parameters can only be provided by online coupled high-resolution ocean models. In addition, the coupling of wave models at the ocean–atmosphere interface allows for a more explicit formulation of small-scale to microphysical processes with local feedbacks to water temperature and large-scale processes such as oceanic upwelling. Over land, important climate feedbacks arise from dynamical terrestrial vegetation changes as well as the implementation of land-use scenarios and afforestation/deforestation that further alter surface albedo, roughness length and evapotranspiration. Furthermore, a good representation of surface temperatures and roughness length over open sea and land areas is critical for the representation of climatic extremes such as heavy precipitation, storms, or tropical nights (defined as nights where the daily minimum temperature does not fall below 20 ∘C), and these parameters appear to be sensitive to coupling. For the present-day climate, many coupled atmosphere–ocean and atmosphere–land surface models have demonstrated the added value of single climate variables, in particular when low-quality boundary data were used in the respective stand-alone model. This makes coupled models a prospective tool for downscaling climate change scenarios from global climate models because these models often have large biases on the regional scale. However, the coupling of hydrology models to close the water cycle remains problematic, as the accuracy of precipitation provided by atmosphere models is, in most cases, insufficient to realistically simulate the runoff to the Baltic Sea without bias adjustments. Many regional stand-alone ocean and atmosphere models are tuned to suitably represent present-day climatologies rather than to accurately simulate climate change. Therefore, more research is required into how the regional climate sensitivity (e.g., the models' response to a given change in global mean temperature) is affected by coupling and how the spread is altered in multi-model and multi-scenario ensembles of coupled models compared with uncoupled ones.

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Divergent desalination effects on alien and native gammarid functional responses

Cuthbert

Briski

2023

Mar Biol

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Climate change could shift the impacts of biological invasions on aquatic ecosystems. Sea freshening is an often-inconspicuous consequence of climatic change that may modify invasive alien species performance in enclosed seas. Several gammarid crustaceans have been particularly successful aliens across fresh, brackish, and marine waters. Here, we use comparative functional responses (feeding rates across resource densities) to examine the ecological impacts of an invasive alien (Gammarus tigrinus) and native (Gammarus locusta) gammarid, present in the Baltic Sea, under three different salinity regimes (14, 10, 6) toward larval chironomid prey. Feeding rates differed between the two species, but these differences depended on salinity, whereby at the lowest salinities, the invasive alien species showed significantly improved performance compared to the native species. Both gammarids exhibited hyperbolic Type II functional responses, with attack rates similar across salinity regimes. Handling times were significantly shortened, and maximum feeding rates heightened, in the alien under sea freshening scenarios compared to the native. These results have implications for enclosed sea systems, where projected freshening could shift the performance advantage toward invasive alien species over natives, thereby exacerbating their ecological impacts.

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Oceanographic regional climate projections for the Baltic Sea until 2100

Cited by 10 publications

References 110 publications

Climate change in the Baltic Sea region: a summary

Climate change in the Baltic Sea region: a summary

Coupled regional Earth system modeling in the Baltic Sea region

Divergent desalination effects on alien and native gammarid functional responses

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