Timescales for detecting a significant acceleration in sea level rise

Haigh, Ivan D.; Wahl, Thomas; Rohling, Eelco J.; Price, René M.; Pattiaratchi, Charitha; Calafat, Francesc; Dangendorf, Sönke

doi:10.1038/ncomms4635

Cited by 140 publications

(148 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…The current view based on observations from the recent past and future projections by coupled GCMs is a long-term trend of rising sea level with natural variations superimposed on this general trend on a range of time scales and due to a number of physical drivers including atmospheric pressure and wind, and large-scale steric variations . This variability obscures the detection of regional climate trends (Haigh et al 2014) both in observations and scenario simulations. Variations in the time-average sea level can be driven by a number of processes.…”

Section: Time-mean Sea Level Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Projected Change—North Sea

Schrum

Lowe

Meier

et al. 2016

North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment

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Increasing numbers of regional climate change scenario assessments have become available for the North Sea. A critical review of the regional studies has helped identify robust changes, challenges, uncertainties and specific recommendations for future research. Coherent findings from the climate change impact studies reviewed in this chapter include overall increases in sea level and ocean temperature, a freshening of the North Sea, an increase in ocean acidification and a decrease in primary production. However, findings from multi-model ensembles show the amplitude and spatial pattern of the projected changes in sea level, temperature, salinity and primary production are not consistent among the various regional projections and remain uncertain. Different approaches are used to downscale global climate change impacts, each with advantages and disadvantages. Regardless of the downscaling method employed, the regional studies are ultimately affected by the forcing global climate models. Projecting regional climate change impacts on biogeochemistry and primary production is currently limited by a lack of consistent downscaling approaches for marine and terrestrial impacts. Substantial natural variability in the North Sea region from annual to multi-decadal time scales is a particular challenge for projecting regional climate change impacts. Natural variability dominates long-term trends in wind fields and strongly wind-influenced characteristics like local sea level, storm C. Schrum

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Section: Time-mean Sea Level Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Projected Change—North Sea

Schrum

Lowe

Meier

et al. 2016

North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment

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“…It is unclear, however, to what extent this higher rate represents natural variability rather than a sustained increase owing to global warming. A detailed study of possible accelerating sea level along the Norwegian coast is not made here, but we note that the climate change signal from increasing greenhouse gases needs time to emerge from natural climate variability, and the sea-level rise observed over recent periods is not significantly larger than rates observed at other times within the past century [36][37][38][39]. This is demonstrated in Figure 4, which shows how the estimated rates vary for a 30-year moving window shifted in steps of 1 year from 1960 to 1986.…”

Section: Sea-level Rates Along the Norwegian Coastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Breili

Simpson

Nilsen

2017

JMSE

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Norway's national sea level observing system consists of an extensive array of tide gauges, permanent GNSS stations, and lines of repeated levelling. Here, we make use of this observation system to calculate relative sea-level rates and rates corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) along the Norwegian coast for three different periods, i.e., 1960 to 2010, 1984 to 2014, and 1993 to 2016. For all periods, the relative sea-level rates show considerable spatial variations that are largely due to differences in vertical land motion due to GIA. The variation is reduced by applying corrections for vertical land motion and associated gravitational effects on sea level. For 1960 to 2010 and 1984 to 2014, the coastal average GIA-corrected rates for Norway are 2.0 ± 0.6 mm/year and 2.2 ± 0.6 mm/year, respectively. This is close to the rate of global sea-level rise for the same periods. For the most recent period, 1993 to 2016, the GIA-corrected coastal average is 3.5 ± 0.6 mm/year and 3.2 ± 0.6 mm/year with and without inverse barometer (IB) corrections, respectively, which is significantly higher than for the two earlier periods. For 1993 to 2016, the coastal average IB-corrected rates show broad agreement with two independent sets of altimetry. This suggests that there is no systematic error in the vertical land motion corrections applied to the tide-gauge data. At the same time, altimetry does not capture the spatial variation identified in the tide-gauge records. This could be an effect of using altimetry observations off the coast instead of directly at each tide gauge. Finally, we note that, owing to natural variability in the climate system, our estimates are highly sensitive to the selected study period. For example, using a 30-year moving window, we find that the estimated rates may change by up to 1 mm/year when shifting the start epoch by only one year.

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“…Haigh et al [27] demonstrated the difficulty of estimating accelerations from local tide-gauge observations, the necessity for long time series (Douglas [28] argued that almost 50 years was required), and the importance of removing unforced and naturally forced variability.…”

Section: Historical Sea Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Progress in Understanding and Projecting Regional and Global Mean Sea Level Change

Clark

Church

Gregory

et al. 2015

Curr Clim Change Rep

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Considerable progress has been made in understanding the present and future regional and global sea level in the 2 years since the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here, we evaluate how the new results affect the AR5's assessment of (i) historical sea level rise, including attribution of that rise and implications for the sea level budget, (ii) projections of the components and of total global mean sea level (GMSL), and (iii) projections of regional variability and emergence of the anthropogenic signal. In each of these cases, new work largely provides additional evidence in support of the AR5 assessment, providing greater confidence in those findings. Recent analyses confirm the twentieth century sea level rise, with some analyses showing a slightly smaller rate before 1990 and some a slightly larger value than reported in the AR5. There is now more evidence of an acceleration in the rate of rise. Ongoing ocean heat uptake and associated thermal expansion have continued since 2000, and are consistent with ocean thermal expansion reported in the AR5. A significant amount of heat is being stored deeper in the water column, with a larger rate of heat uptake since 2000 compared to the previous decades and with the largest storage in the Southern Ocean. The first formal detection studies for ocean thermal expansion and glacier mass loss since the AR5 have confirmed the AR5 finding of a significant anthropogenic contribution to sea level rise over the last 50 years. New projections of glacier loss from two regions suggest smaller contributions to GMSL rise from these regions than in studies assessed by the AR5; additional regional studies are required to further assess whether there are broader implications of these results. Mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, primarily as a result of increased surface melting, and from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, primarily as a result of increased ice discharge, has accelerated. The largest estimates of acceleration in mass loss from the two ice sheets for 2003-2013 equal or exceed the acceleration of GMSL rise calculated from the satellite altimeter sea level record over the longer period of 1993-2014. However, when increased mass gain in land water storage and parts of East Antarctica, and decreased mass loss from glaciers in Alaska and some other regions are taken into account, the net acceleration in the ocean mass gain is consistent with the satellite altimeter record. New studies suggest that a marine ice sheet instability (MISI) may have been initiated in parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), but that it will affect only a limited number of ice streams in the twenty-first century. New projections of mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets by 2100, including a contribution from parts of WAIS undergoing unstable retreat, suggest a contribution that falls largely within the likely range (i.e., two thirds probability) of the AR5. These new results increase confidence in the AR5 likel...

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Timescales for detecting a significant acceleration in sea level rise

Cited by 140 publications

References 47 publications

Projected Change—North Sea

Projected Change—North Sea

Observed Sea-Level Changes along the Norwegian Coast

Recent Progress in Understanding and Projecting Regional and Global Mean Sea Level Change

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