The Causes of Regional Sea-level Change: since 1993

As a result of climate change, sea level is changing all over the world at unprecedented rates. Sea-level change can have significant impacts on coastal communities, infrastructure and global economy, as most of the major cities are located near to or at the coast. Rising sea levels can lead to, for instance, more severe and more frequent...

Understanding Sea-Level Change Using Global and Regional Models

The sea level is changing around the world due to a combination of complex processes, such as changes in ocean density and circulation, the melt of ice sheets and glaciers, terrestrial water storage and vertical land motion. Projections of how much and how fast sea level will change are crucial information for adaptation planning. At the basis...

Assessment of sea-level variations along the Dutch coastline

Long-term sea level change and its spatial and temporal variability measured with tide gauge stations along the Dutch coast have been studied. This study investigates how time series length and modeling choices influence the adoption of a quadratic over a linear sea level model. We apply linear and quadratic models to corrected tide gauges, for...

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...

Dynamical downscaling of unforced interannual sea-level variability in the North-West European shelf seas

Variability of Sea-Surface Height (SSH) from ocean dynamic processes is an important component of sea-level change. In this study we dynamically downscale a present-day control simulation of a climate model to replicate sea-level variability in the Northwest European shelf seas. The simulation can reproduce many characteristics of sea-level...

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...

Estimating decadal variability in sea level from tide gauge records: An application to the North Sea

One of the primary observational data sets of sea level is represented by the tide gauge record. We propose a new method to estimate variability on decadal time scales from tide gauge data by using a state space formulation, which couples the direct observations to a predefined state space model by using a Kalman filter. The model consists of...