by Daniel Brouse
When we authored our paper on the acceleration of climate change, we couldn’t have anticipated its rapid pace. The doubling period for sea level rise, which was projected to span 100 years, dramatically shortened to 10 years by 2020. Shockingly, recent observations indicate that this doubling period has further compressed to just 2 years. We can only hope that this alarming trend is an aberration rather than a new norm.
NASA Reports:
A long-term sea level dataset shows ocean surface heights continuing to rise at faster and faster rates over decades of observations.
Global average sea level rose by about 0.3 inches (0.76 centimeters) from 2022 to 2023, a relatively large jump due mostly to a warming climate and the development of a strong El Niño. The total rise is equivalent to draining a quarter of Lake Superior into the ocean over the course of a year.
This NASA-led analysis is based on a sea level dataset featuring more than 30 years of satellite observations, starting with the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon mission, which launched in 1992. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission, which launched in November 2020, is the latest in the series of satellites that have contributed to this sea level record.
The data shows that global average sea level has risen a total of about 4 inches (9.4 centimeters) since 1993. The rate of this increase has also accelerated, more than doubling from 0.07 inches (0.18 centimeters) per year in 1993 to the current rate of 0.17 inches (0.42 centimeters) per year.
“Current rates of acceleration mean that we are on track to add another 20 centimeters of global mean sea level by 2050, doubling the amount of change in the next three decades compared to the previous 100 years and increasing the frequency and impacts of floods across the world,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, director for the NASA sea level change team and the ocean physics program in Washington.
Seasonal Effects
Global sea level saw a significant jump from 2022 to 2023 due mainly to a switch between La Niña and El Niño conditions. A mild La Niña from 2021 to 2022 resulted in a lower-than-expected rise in sea level that year. A strong El Niño developed in 2023, helping to boost the average amount of rise in sea surface height.
La Niña is characterized by cooler-than-normal ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño involves warmer-than-average ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. Both periodic climate phenomena affect patterns of rainfall and snowfall as well as sea levels around the world.
“During La Niña, rain that normally falls in the ocean falls on the land instead, temporarily taking water out of the ocean and lowering sea levels,” said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “In El Niño years, a lot of the rain that normally falls on land ends up in the ocean, which raises sea levels temporarily.”
* Our climate model employs chaos theory to comprehensively consider human impacts and projects a potential global average temperature increase of 9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
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