The timing of decreasing coastal flood protection due to sea-level rise

Sea-level rise amplifies the frequency of extreme sea levels by raising their baseline height. Amplifications are often projected for arbitrary future years and benchmark frequencies. Consequently, such projections do not indicate when flood risk thresholds may be crossed given the current degree of local coastal protection. To better support...

Regionalizing the sea-level budget with machine learning techniques

Attribution of sea-level change to its different drivers is typically done using a sea-level budget approach. While the global mean sea-level budget is considered closed, closing the budget on a finer spatial scale is more complicated due to, for instance, limitations in our observational system and the spatial processes contributing to regional...

The Effect of Wind Stress on Seasonal Sea-Level Change on the Northwestern European Shelf

Projections of relative sea level change (RSLC) are commonly reported at an annual mean basis. The seasonality of RSLC is often not considered, even though it may modulate the impacts of annual mean RSLC. Here, we study seasonal differences in twenty-first-century ocean dynamic sea level change (DSLC; 2081–2100 minus 1995–2014) on the...

Trends and uncertainties of mass-driven sea-level change in the satellite altimetry era

Ocean mass change is one of the main drivers of present-day sea-level change (SLC). Also known as barystatic SLC, ocean mass change is caused by the exchange of freshwater between the land and the ocean, such as melting of continental ice from glaciers and ice sheets, and variations in land water storage. While many studies have quantified the...

Projecting Global Mean Sea-Level Change Using CMIP6 Models

The effective climate sensitivity (EffCS) of models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) has increased relative to CMIP5. We explore the implications of this for global mean sea-level (GMSL) change projections in 2100 for three emissions scenarios. CMIP6 projections of global surface air temperature are substantially higher...

Drivers of Interannual Sea Level Variability on the Northwestern European Shelf

Sea level on the northwestern European shelf (NWES) varies substantially from year to year. Removing explained parts of interannual sea level variability from observations helps to improve estimates of long-term sea level trends. To this end, the contributions of different drivers to interannual sea level variability need to be understood and...

Exploring Sources of Uncertainty in Steric Sea-Level Change Estimates

Recent studies disagree about the contribution of variations in temperature and salinity of the oceans—steric change—to the observed sea-level change. This article explores two sources of uncertainty to both global mean and regional steric sea-level trends. First, we analyze the influence of different temperature and salinity data sets on the...

Improving sea-level projections on the Northwestern European shelf using dynamical downscaling

Changes in ocean properties and circulation lead to a spatially non-uniform pattern of ocean dynamic sea-level change (DSLC). The projections of ocean dynamic sea level presented in the IPCC AR5 were constructed with global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5). Since CMIP5 GCMs have a relatively...