North Sea Storminess from a Novel Storm Surge Record since AD 1843*
Top Cited Papers
- 9 May 2014
- journal article
- Published by American Meteorological Society in Journal of Climate
- Vol. 27 (10), 3582-3595
- https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-13-00427.1
Abstract
The detection of potential long-term changes in historical storm statistics and storm surges plays a vitally important role for protecting coastal communities. In the absence of long homogeneous wind records, the authors present a novel, independent, and homogeneous storm surge record based on water level observations in the North Sea since 1843. Storm surges are characterized by considerable interannual-to-decadal variability linked to large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Time periods of increased storm surge levels prevailed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries without any evidence for significant long-term trends. This contradicts with recent findings based on reanalysis data, which suggest increasing storminess in the region since the late nineteenth century. The authors compare the wind and pressure fields from the Twentieth-Century Reanalysis (20CRv2) with the storm surge record by applying state-of-the-art empirical wind surge formulas. The comparison reveals that the reanalysis is a valuable tool that leads to good results over the past 100 yr; previously the statistical relationship fails, leaving significantly lower values in the upper percentiles of the predicted surge time series. These low values lead to significant upward trends over the entire investigation period, which are in turn supported by neither the storm surge record nor an independent circulation index based on homogeneous pressure readings. The authors therefore suggest that these differences are related to higher uncertainties in the earlier years of the 20CRv2 over the North Sea region.Keywords
This publication has 41 references indexed in Scilit:
- Characteristics of intra-, inter-annual and decadal sea-level variability and the role of meteorological forcing: the long record of CuxhavenOcean Dynamics, 2013
- Mean Sea Level Variability and Influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation on Long-Term Trends in the German BightWater, 2012
- Extreme winds at northern mid-latitudes since 1871Meteorologische Zeitschrift, 2012
- Reanalysis suggests long-term upward trends in European storminess since 1871Geophysical Research Letters, 2011
- Future changes in European winter storm losses and extreme wind speeds inferred from GCM and RCM multi-model simulationsNatural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 2011
- Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st CenturySurveys in Geophysics, 2011
- The Twentieth Century Reanalysis ProjectQuarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2011
- Daily Mean Sea Level Pressure Reconstructions for the European–North Atlantic Region for the Period 1850–2003Journal of Climate, 2006
- Scandinavian storminess since about 1800Geophysical Research Letters, 2004
- Trends of storms in NW Europe derived from an updated pressure data setClimate Research, 2000