Regional Climate Change Of The Black Sea, Sea Of Azov, And Caspian Sea
Kostianoy, Andrey1; Ginzburg, Anna2; Lebedev, Sergey3
1P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, RUSSIAN FEDERATION; 2SIO RAS, RUSSIAN FEDERATION; 3GC RAS, SRI RAS, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Monthly oceanographic and meteorological data for the last 30 years (from 1979 to 2011), collected in the data bases of NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center have been used for the analysis of seasonal and interannual variability of the main physical parameters of the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and Caspian Sea. Sea surface temperature (SST) variability of the seas was analyzed on the base of weekly satellite AVHRR data of the NASA JPL PO.DAAC AVHRR-Pathfinder Project for 1982-2009 with spatial resolution of 4 km. Sea level variability was investigated for the period of 1993-2011 on the base of satellite altimetry data acquired from TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason 1/2. As a supplementary information we used oceanographic and published data. For every sea we investigated the variability and calculated a linear trend for the following parameters: air temperature, atmospheric precipitation, wind speed, SST, salinity in the upper layer, ice cover, sea level, and runoff of the main rivers. Basing on the analysis of these parameters, it was found that regional climate change of the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and Caspian Sea is different, but the main feature is the continuous warming of all seas, which is clearly visible in the air temperature, SST and ice cover variability.