An Assessment of Changes in the Thermal Environment during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Case Studies from the Greenland and Norwegian Seas

Abstract

The COVID-19 lockdown had a significant impact on human activities, reducing anthropogenic heat and CO2 emissions. To effectively assess the impact of the lockdown on the thermal environment, we used the sliding paired t-test, which we improved from the traditional sliding t-test by introducing the paired t-test for sliding statistical tests, to test the abrupt change in the thermal environment. Furthermore, an additive decomposition model and wavelet analysis method were used to analyze the characteristics of trend and irregular change, coherence, and phase difference of the time series data with respect to the thermal environment. We chose the Greenland Sea and the Norwegian Sea, regions highly sensitive to changes in climate and ocean circulation, as case studies and used remote sensing data of the sea surface temperature (SST) and the atmospheric CO2 concentration data obtained from the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center from January 2015 to December 2021 for the analysis. The results show that although the annual spatial mean SST in 2020 is lower than the mean of all 7 years in most areas of the two seas, there is no evidence of a significant mutation in the decrease in the SST during the lockdown in 2020 compared with the temperatures before, according to the sliding paired t-test. The analysis of the irregular components of the monthly mean SST decomposed by an additive decomposition model also does not show the anomalously low SST during the lockdown in 2020. In addition, the lockdown had almost no impact on the increasing trend of CO2 concentration. The wavelet analysis also shows that there is no obvious anomaly in coherence or phase difference between the periodic variation of the SST and the CO2 concentrations in 2020 compared with other years. These results suggest that the direct effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on the thermal environment of the study area could be negligible.