The Changing Bohai and Yellow Seas: A Physical View

Abstract

The Bohai and Yellow Seas (BYSs) are the marginal seas in the Northwestern Pacific region. Consistent with the general trend of global warming, the BYSs are also changing rapidly which include the change of sea surface temperature (SST), water masses and sea level etc. These parameters are very sensitive to the global warming due to the shallow water depth of the BYSs. The SST in the BYSs shows an increasing trend of 0.8 to 2 °C per century, nearly twice of the globally averaged rate. Similarly, the Yellow Sea Cold Water Mass (YSCWM), which is one of the most prominent hydrologic features in the YS, also shows a clear warming trend in its northern part. Previous studies also found that the coastal sea level in the BYSs is increasing rapidly with the rising rate higher than the global average. Besides these long-term varying trend, there also exist strong interannual variations which sometimes can be regarded as responses to the large-scale climatic variations affecting the East Asian monsoon, such as the Arctic Oscillation (AO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Artificial coastline changing also induced the storm surge abnormal variation especially in the BS.