The North Sea, a temporally trendy place 1900-2016

This chapter introduces the marine databases that have been assimilated together for the North West European Continental Shelf. The assimilated databases provide enough temporal data to be analysed, and allow the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen to be investigated at a regional scale. Although the data exists across the whole European Shelf domain, the focus of this chapter examines only the North Sea due to the vastness in data compared to other regions. The North Sea also holds the 'oldest' water on the E.U. shelf (Chapter 3) and is a key component of (Chapter 4). The vastness in data exists due to only winter data (December, January, February) being used within this analysis (Chapter 2.2). All other regions of the North West European Shelf have insufficient data to determine any temporal trends for the Winter period.
The biogeochemical processes span multiple years and are subjected to inter-annual variability due to the dynamism of the Shelf Sea System. The temporal trends are examined using Salinity, Nitrate and Phosphate to investigate denitrification.
Salinity is a conservative tracer within the Shelf Sea System and can be used to determine shelf edge mixing processes as well as identifying riverine input. Phosphate concentrations from UK agriculture