Global sea level acceleration

Abstract

Greenhouse warming scenarios commonly forecast an acceleration of sea level rise in the next 5 or 6+ decades in the range 0.1–0.2 mm/yr². Long tide gauge records (75 years minimum) have been examined for past apparent sea level acceleration (i.e., deviation from a purely linear rise) and for indication of how long it might take to detect or verify a predicted future acceleration. For the 80‐year period 1905–1985, 23 essentially complete tide gauge records in 10 geographic groups are available for analysis. These yielded the apparent global acceleration −0.011 (±0.012) mm/yr². A larger, less uniform set of 37 records in the same 10 groups with 92 years average length covering the 141 years from 1850 to 1991 gave for acceleration 0.001 (±0.008) mm/yr². Thus there is no evidence for an apparent acceleration in the past 100+ years that is significant either statistically, or in comparison to values associated with global warming. Estimating how well a global acceleration parameter could be determined in a relatively short time was accomplished by dividing the 1905–1985 data set into four equal time spans. The formal 1σ uncertainty (about 0.2 mm/yr²) of global acceleration from these 20‐year periods is more than an order of magnitude larger than for the 80‐ and 141‐year cases owing to the existence of large interdecadal and longer variations of sea level. This means that tide gauges alone cannot serve as a leading indicator of climate change in less than at least several decades. Confirming the prediction of a particular model at the 95% confidence level or differentiating between model predictions will take much longer. The time required can be significantly reduced if the interdecadal fluctuations of sea level can be understood in terms of their forcing mechanisms and then removed from the tide gauge records.