Meteorological forcing of long-term temperature variations of the Dutch coastal waters

Time series of observations of the sea surface temperature (SST) at 12 stations in the Dutch coastal zone are analyzed to establish whether an earlier published nearly 150 year long SST time series from the Marsdiep tidal inlet is representative for the whole Dutch coastal zone. The annual cycles (SST range and phase) as well as the long-term SST trends at decadal scales from other estuaries agree with the Marsdiep time series. An increasing SST trend since 1982 is a phenomenon of the whole Dutch coastal zone. In order to increase the understanding of the causes of the observed SST variability, a multiple linear regression model is constructed, which links locally determined seasonal meteorological and oceanographic forcing factors to the seasonal mean SST. The oceanographic forcing factor is the SST value from the preceding season, representing persistence due to thermal inertia of the sea. Season to season changes of the atmospheric circulation, connected with SST variability, are represented by seasonal mean wind components as forcing factors, e.g. the western winds in winter which bring relatively warm air masses to Western Europe. For the seasons where shortwave solar radiation is the dominant term in the local heat budget (spring and summer), the number of bright sun hours is used as forcing factor, roughly representing the effects of changing cloudiness. The annual mean SST, derived from the regression models for the four seasons, applied to 4 locations along the Dutch coast, correlates quite well, not only for the year to year variability (R = 0.88) but also for the longer-term SST trends (R = 0.95). An explicit local greenhouse effect is not required as separate forcing factor to explain the recent warming trend of Dutch coastal waters starting in the early 1980s; coincident variations in wind statistics and cloudiness are a sufficient explanation.