PCIC science brief: Sea level rise observations and acceleration
Date
2018-02
Authors
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Abstract
Three recent journal articles examine the rate of sea level rise and the ability of models to accurately simulate sea level rise at a global and regional scale. Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters, Yi et al. (2017) examine the rate at which sea level rise is accelerating and find that the rate of acceleration over the 2005-2015 period is three times faster than it was over the 1993-2014 period and an order of magnitude larger than the acceleration over the 1920-2011 period. They also identify three primary contributors to this acceleration: the thermal expansion of sea water, reduced storage of water on land and the melting of ice on land. In a pair of articles published in the Journal of Climate, Slangen et al. (2017) and Meyssignac et al. (2017) analyze the of climate models to simulate both global and regional sea level rise. They find that simulations can only explain about half (50% ± 30%) of the observed sea level rise. After bias corrections are included for the Greenland ice sheet and the possibility that ice sheets and the deep ocean were not in equilibrium with the 20th Century climate, the models explain about three-quarters (75% ± 38%) of the observed 20th Century sea level rise and all (105% ± 35%) of the observed sea level rise over the period from 1993-1997 to 2011-2015 period. Regionally, climate models underestimate the amount of sea level rise that occured, but do show reasonable agreement for interannual and multidecadal variability. When the same bias corrections are applied, the models come into closer agreement with observations. In addition, they find that the spatial variability in regional sea level rise is largely due to the thermal expansion of sea water and ongoing isostatic adjustment resulting from the end of the last glacial period.
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Keywords
UN SDG 13: Climate Action, #science brief, #PCIC publication