Investigating Long-Term Trends of Sea Level Anomalies in the Persian Gulf and the Parameters Affecting it Using Multi-Source Data

The trend of the sea level changes is seriously challenging the coastal cities around the globe. Changes are various in different geographical conditions. The semi-enclosed sea of the Persian Gulf experiences the anaomalies with a higher rate in camparison to the world average. Therefore, it is quite imporatant to investigate the degree of influence and correlation of governing parameters including, sea surface temperature (SST), air temperature at 2 meters above the surface, sea surface salinity (SSS), and horizontal wind speed in both east and north directions using a set of remote sensing data, hybrid (HYCOM), and reanalysis product data (ERA5) from 1993 to 2020 in the Persian Gulf. The long-term annual trend in the Persian Gulf shows the following changes; 3.9 mm/yr in the sea level, 0.02 °C/yr in SST, 0.024 °C/yr in air temperature at 2 m above the surface, -0.03 psu/yr in SSS, and -0.01 ms-1/yr and 0.01 ms-1/yr in horizontal speed of air moving respectively towards the East direction and the north direction. Also, according to the results of the monthly and annual correlation between these parameters with the sea level changes only correlation with SST  with R2=0.6 (p-value=0.04) and with SSS R2=-0.4 (p-value=0.03) were significant. The comparison of the results in monthly and annual scales shows that the sea level changes in the Persian Gulf do not show the same patterns. Rather, these changes are affected by different parameters in different time of the year.