Abstract:
Objectives Global warming has become a significant climate change in the past 100 years. And the global mean sea level continues rising caused by the thermal expansion of sea water and the melting of land-based glacier and polar ice. The Ny-Alesund area in Arctic has preserved a typical primitive polar ecosystem. The objective and accurate analysis of sea level change in this area can better provide a basis for monitoring and protection of natural ecological environment, and for the research of climate change.
Methods This paper analyzed the liner trend and seasonal variation of sea level change by using data of satellite altimeter, tide gauge station and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) along Ny-Alesund coast from 1993 to 2018.
Results The observation data at tide gauge station show that the rate of crust rise is (8.09±0.19) mm/a, and the rate of relative sea level decline is (-7.31±0.36) mm/a. So the rate of absolute sea level rise is (0.78±0.41) mm/a, which is similar to the result from observation data of satellite alti-meter with the difference of (0.23±0.46) mm/a, and is lower than the rate of global sea level rise.
Conclusions In the analysis of regional sea level change, we can get the absolute sea level rise with correction of tide gauge station by GNSS. The relative sea level change corrected by GNSS is characterized by significant seasonal features in Ny-Alesund. The period of seasonal high sea level is from October to November, and the period of seasonal low sea level is from March to April. The correlation analysis between sea surface temperature and sea level shows that the sea level changes with sea surface temperature.