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

A statistical downscaling approach is applied to the output of five different global climate model simulations driven by 21 century future scenarios of greenhouse gas concentrations. The contribution of sea-level pressure 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 sea-level pressure as predictor for the central and eastern Baltic Sea level stations, three climate models lead to statistically significant 21 century future trends in the range of the order of 1 to 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.