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Abstract
Decadal sea-level variability masks longer-term changes due to natural and anthropogenic drivers in short-duration records and increases uncertainty in trend and acceleration estimates. When making regional coastal management and adaptation decisions, it is important to understand the drivers of these changes to account for periods of reduced or enhanced sea-level change. The variance in decadal sea-level trends about the global mean is quantified and mapped around the global coastlines of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans from historical CMIP6 runs and a high-resolution ocean model forced by reanalysis data. We reconstruct coastal, sea-level trends via linear relationships with climate mode and oceanographic indices. Using this approach, more than one-third of the variability in decadal sea-level trends can be explained by climate indices at 24.6 % to 73.1 % of grid cells located within 25 km of a coast in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. At 10.9 % of the world's coastline, climate variability explains over two-thirds of the decadal sea-level trend. By investigating the steric, manometric, and gravitational components of sea-level trend independently, it is apparent that much of the coastal ocean variability is dominated by the manometric signal, the consequence of the open-ocean steric signal propagating onto the continental shelf. Additionally, decadal variability in the gravitational, rotational, and solid-Earth deformation (GRD) signal should not be ignored in the total. There are locations such as the Persian Gulf and African west coast where decadal sea-level variability is historically small that are susceptible to future changes in hydrology and/or ice mass changes that drive intensified regional GRD sea-level change above the global mean. The magnitude of variance explainable by climate modes quantified in this study indicates an enhanced uncertainty in projections of short- to mid-term regional sea-level trend.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1093-1107 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Ocean Science |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 27 Jul 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Financial support. This research has been supported by Horizon
Funding Information:
2020 (GlobalMass (grant no. 694188)), the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. RF-2016-718), and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. The authors are very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and constructive criticisms of the discussion paper. The authors were all supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 694188: the GlobalMass project (https://globalmass. eu, last access: 20 July 2022). Jonathan L. Bamber was additionally supported through a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (RF-2016-718) and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. We would like to thank Richard Westaway (University of Bristol) for project management and editing of a previous version of the paper for language and publication quality review. The authors are grateful for the open availability of observational and derived data sets, as referenced in the text and the “Data availability” section.
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright:
Research Groups and Themes
- GlobalMass
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Dive into the research topics of 'Attributing decadal climate variability in coastal sea-level trends'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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GlobalMass: Global ice and ocean mass trends
Bates, P. D. (Co-Principal Investigator), Bingham, R. J. (Co-Principal Investigator), Chuter, S. J. (Researcher), Hofer, S. (Student), Llovell, W. (Researcher), Martin Espanol, A. (Researcher), Rougier, J. C. (Co-Principal Investigator), Schumacher, M. (Researcher), Sha, Z. (Researcher), Westaway, R. M. (Manager), Royston, S. J. (Researcher), Vishwakarma, B. D. (Researcher), Bamber, J. L. (Principal Investigator), Brady, A. (Researcher), Ziegler, Y. (Researcher), Abele, A. K. (Student) & Lehmann, F. (Student)
1/08/16 → 30/11/22
Project: Research