A new approach to local climate identification in the Baltic Sea’s coastal area

Abstract

One of the main tasks of this work is to investigate a different and new approach to coastal climate identification in the Baltic Sea’s coastal areas. A different approach of spatial correlation between solar net shortwave radiation flux and air temperature data helps to distinguish and derive areas which receive the same amount of energy but have a different average air temperature than the surrounding territories. Most of the successful climate classifications consist of three climatic variables (temperature, precipitation and temperature range). This work establishes that bivariate correlation maps of solar net shortwave radiation flux and air temperature can also be successfully used to identify local coastal climate around the Baltic Sea. The data used is the WorldClim global climate dataset and NOAH025_2.0 model output. Model data is used for calculating the correlation maps and is later compared to long-term air temperature range maps of the Baltic Sea’s coastal area. The study shows that in combination with standard classification methods, the research results can later be applied for classification of local coastal climates. Thus, the method proposed opens new potential to study coastal climate with a higher degree of accuracy. However, further studies are required to characterize the behaviour of this method for other than temperate climates.