Sea-level variability increasingly contributes to coastal impacts such as flooding, erosion, and damage to infrastructure or ecosystems due to saltwater inundation (

Sea level variability increasingly contributes to coastal flooding and erosion as global sea levels rise, partly due to the thermal expansion of seawater, which accelerates with increasing temperature. Climate model simulations with increasing greenhouse gas emissions suggest that future sea level variability, such as the annual and interannual oscillations that alter local astronomical tidal cycles and contribute to coastal impacts, will also increase in many regions. Here, we present an analysis of the CMIP5 climate model projections of future sea level to show that there is a tendency for a near-global increase in sea level variability with continued warming that is robust across models, regardless of whether ocean temperature variability increases. Specifically, for an upper-ocean warming by 2 °C, which is likely to be reached by the end of this century, sea level variability increases by 4 to 10% globally on seasonal-to-interannual timescales because of the nonlinear thermal expansion of seawater. As the oceans continue to warm, future ocean temperature oscillations will cause increasingly larger buoyancy-related sea level fluctuations that may alter coastal risks.

Hawaii experienced record-high sea levels during 2017, which followed the 2015 strong El Niño and coincided with weak trade winds in the tropical northeastern Pacific. The record sea levels were associated with a combination of processes, an important contributing factor of which was the persistent high sea level (~10 cm above normal) over a large region stretching between Hawaii and Mexico. High sea levels at Mexico are known to occur during strong El Niño as the coastal thermocline deepens. Planetary wave theory predicts that these coastal anomalies propagate westward into the basin interior; however, high sea levels at Hawaii do not occur consistently following strong El Niño events. In particular, Hawaii sea levels remained near normal following the previous strong El Niño of 1997. The processes controlling whether Hawaii sea levels rise after El Niño have so far remained unknown. Atmosphere-forced ocean model experiments show that anomalous surface cooling, controlled by variable trade winds, impacts sea level via mixed layer density, explaining much of the difference in Hawaiian sea level response after the two recent strong El Niño events. In climate model projections with greenhouse warming, more frequent weak trade winds following El Niño events are expected, suggesting that the occurrence of high sea levels at Hawaii will increase as oceanic anomalies more often traverse the basin.