The causes of sea-level rise since 1900

Frederikse, Thomas; Landerer, F. W.; Caron, Lambert; Adhikari, Surendra; Parkes, David; Humphrey, Vincent; Dangendorf, Sönke; Hogarth, Peter J.; Zanna, Laure; Cheng, Lijing; Wu, Yun Hao

doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2591-3

Cited by 363 publications

(450 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…6a). This is consistent with the lesser contributions of glaciers and Greenland ice-sheet melting in the Subpolar North Atlantic basin -to which the Mediterranean Sea is connectedas reported in Frederikse et al (2020). Note that the GMSL-Venetian MSL discrepancy observed in the first portion of the record is resolved when uncertainty in GMSL estimate is taken into account (not shown).…”

Section: Secular Trendsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…These regionally coherent estimates are lower than those for the global-mean sea-level (GMSL) rise during the 20 th Century reported in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5), quantified as 1.7 [1.5 to 1.9] mm/year (likelihood >90%, period from 1901 to 2010, see: Church et al, 2013). They are, however, consistent with revisited estimates of historical GMSL rise that include significantly slower rates than reported by the IPCC-AR5 for the prealtimetry period, e.g., 1.2±0.2 mm/year (90% confidence interval, Hay et al, 2015), 1.1 ± 0.3 mm/year (99% confidence interval, Dangendorf et al, 2017) and 1.56 ± 0.33 mm/year (90% confidence interval, Frederikse et al, 2020). Figure 6 revisits the connection between Venetian and GMSL trends on time scales ranging from interannual to centennial.…”

Section: Secular Trendsupporting

confidence: 81%

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Review article: Sea-level rise in Venice: historic and future trends

Zanchettin

Bruni

Raicich

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Abstract. The City of Venice and the surrounding lagoonal ecosystem are highly vulnerable to variations in relative sea level. In the past ~150 years, this was characterized by a secular linear trend of about 2.5 mm/year resulting from the combined contributions of vertical land movement and sea-level rise. This literature review reassesses and synthesizes the progress achieved in understanding, estimating and predicting the individual contributions to local relative sea level, with focus on the most recent publications. The current best estimate of historical sea-level rise in Venice, based on tide-gauge data after removal of subsidence effects, is 1.23 ± 0.13 mm/year (period from 1872 to 2019). Subsidence thus contributed to about half of the observed relative sea-level rise over the same period. A higher – yet more uncertain – rate of sea-level rise is observed during recent decades, estimated from tide-gauge data to be about 2.76 ± 1.75 mm/year in the period 1993–2019 for the climatic component alone. An unresolved issue is the contrast between the observational capacity of tide gauges and satellite altimetry, with the latter tool not covering the Venice Lagoon. Water mass exchanges through the Gibraltar Strait currently constitute a source of substantial uncertainty for estimating future deviations of the Mediterranean mean sea-level trend from the global-mean value. Subsidence and regional atmospheric and oceanic circulation mechanisms can deviate Venetian relative sea-level trends from the global mean values for several decades. Regional processes will likely continue to determine significant interannual and interdecadal variability of Venetian sea level with magnitude comparable to that observed in the past, as well as non-negligible differential trends. Our estimate of the likely range of mean sea-level rise in Venice by 2100 due to climate change is presently estimated between 11 and 110 centimetres. An improbable yet possible high-end scenario linked to strong ice-sheet melting yields about 170 centimetres of mean sea-level rise in Venice by 2100. Projections of natural and human induced vertical land motions are currently not available, but historical evidence demonstrates that they can produce a significant contribution to the relative sea-level rise in Venice, further increasing the hazard posed by climatically-induced sea-level changes.

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Section: Secular Trendsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Secular Trendsupporting

confidence: 81%

Review article: Sea-level rise in Venice: historic and future trends

Zanchettin

Bruni

Raicich

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Finally, estimates of the global glacier mass change contribution to sea-level rise, excluding Greenland and Antarctic periphery and not given in Table 4, of Frederikse et al (2020) agree well with ours for the more recent time intervals they specify (1957 -2018 and 1993 -2018), while our estimates lie at the very low end of the confidence interval given for the whole time interval they studied (1900 -2018). This is presumably due to the modeling approach that their estimates in early years rely on, which includes estimations of disappeared and missing glaciers that are not included in the RGI.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

20th century global glacier mass change: an ensemble-based model reconstruction

Malles¹,

Marzeion²

2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Negative glacier mass balances in most of Earth's glacierized regions contribute roughly one quarter to currently observed rates of sea-level rise, and have likely contributed an even larger fraction during the 20th century. The distant past and future of glaciers' mass balances, and hence their contribution to sea-level rise, can only be calculated using numerical models. Since independent of complexity, models always rely on some form of parameterizations and a choice of boundary conditions, a need for optimization arises. In this work, a model for computing monthly mass balances of glaciers on the global scale was forced with nine different data sets of near-surface air temperature and precipitation anomalies, as well as with their mean and median, leading to a total of eleven different forcing data sets. Five global parameters of the model’s mass balance equations were varied systematically, within physically plausible ranges, for each forcing data set. We then identified optimal parameter combinations by cross-validating the model results against in-situ mass balance observations, using three criteria: model bias, temporal correlation, and the ratio between the observed and modeled temporal standard deviation of specific mass balances. The goal is to better constrain the glaciers' 20th century sea-level budget contribution and its uncertainty. We find that the disagreement between the different ensemble members is often larger than the uncertainties obtained via cross-validation, particularly in times and places where few or no validation data are available, such as the first half of the 20th century. We show that the reason for this is that the availability of mass balance observations often coincides with less uncertainty in the forcing data, such that the cross-validation procedure does not capture the true out-of-sample uncertainty of the glacier model. Therefore, ensemble spread is introduced as an additional estimate of reconstruction uncertainty, increasing the total uncertainty compared to the model uncertainty obtained in the cross validation. Our ensemble mean estimate indicates a sea-level contribution by global glaciers (excluding Antarctic periphery) for 1901–2018 of 76.2 ± 5.9 mm sea-level equivalent (SLE), or 0.65 ± 0.05 mm SLE yr−1.

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“…Over the satellite period, the observed GMSL rise, inferred from satellite altimetry [7,8], agrees with the sum of the observed contributions [5], thus closing the sea-level budget. Recently, this has also been achieved for the global mean sea-level budget since 1900 and for the major ocean basins since the 1950s, except for the Southern and Arctic Oceans [9] due to lack of data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arctic Sea Level Budget Assessment during the GRACE/Argo Time Period

et al. 2020

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Sea level change is an important indicator of climate change. Our study focuses on the sea level budget assessment of the Arctic Ocean using: (1) the newly reprocessed satellite altimeter data with major changes in the processing techniques; (2) ocean mass change data derived from GRACE satellite gravimetry; (3) and steric height estimated from gridded hydrographic data for the GRACE/Argo time period (2003–2016). The Beaufort Gyre (BG) and the Nordic Seas (NS) regions exhibit the largest positive trend in sea level during the study period. Halosteric sea level change is found to dominate the area averaged sea level trend of BG, while the trend in NS is found to be influenced by halosteric and ocean mass change effects. Temporal variability of sea level in these two regions reveals a significant shift in the trend pattern centered around 2009–2011. Analysis suggests that this shift can be explained by a change in large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns over the Arctic. The sea level budget assessment of the Arctic found a residual trend of more than 1.0 mm/yr. This nonclosure of the sea level budget is further attributed to the limitations of the three above mentioned datasets in the Arctic region.

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The causes of sea-level rise since 1900

Cited by 363 publications

References 77 publications

Review article: Sea-level rise in Venice: historic and future trends

Review article: Sea-level rise in Venice: historic and future trends

20th century global glacier mass change: an ensemble-based model reconstruction

Arctic Sea Level Budget Assessment during the GRACE/Argo Time Period

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