Understanding past and future sea surface temperature trends in the Baltic Sea

The Baltic Sea is one of the fastest-warming semi-enclosed seas in the world over the last decades, yielding critical consequences on physical and biogeochemical conditions and on marine ecosystems. Although long-term trends in sea surface temperature (SST) have long been attributed to trends in air temperature, there are however, strong seasonal and sub-basin scale heterogeneities of similar magnitude than the average trend which are not fully explained. Here, using reconstructed atmospheric forcing fields for the period 1850–2008, oceanic climate simulations were performed and analyzed to identify areas of homogenous SST trends using spatial clustering. Our results show that the Baltic Sea can be divided into five different areas of homogeneous SST trends: the Bothnian Bay, the Bothnian Sea, the eastern and western Baltic proper, and the southwestern Baltic Sea. A classification tree and sensitivity experiments were carried out to analyze the main drivers behind the trends. While ice cover explains the seasonal north/south warming contrast, the changes in surface winds and air-sea temperature anomalies (along with changes in upwelling frequencies and heat fluxes) explain the SST trends differences between the sub-basins of the southern part of the Baltic Sea. To investigate future warming trends climate simulations were performed for the period 1976–2099 using two RCP scenarios. It was found that the seasonal north/south gradient of SST trends should be reduced in the future due to the vanishing of sea ice, while changes in the frequency of upwelling and heat fluxes explained the lower future east/west gradient of SST trend in fall. Finally, an ensemble of 48 climate change simulations has revealed that for a given RCP scenario the atmospheric forcing is the main source of uncertainty. Our results are useful to better understand the historical and future changes of SST in the Baltic Sea, but also in terms of marine ecosystem and public management, and could thus be used for planning sustainable coastal development.