Predictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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Date
2013
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
1-8
Series
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS, Volume 8, issue 1
Abstract
The prediction of global sea-level rise is one of the major challenges of climate science. While process-based models are still being improved to capture the complexity of the processes involved, semi-empirical models, exploiting the observed connection between global-mean sea level and global temperature and calibrated with data, have been developed as a complementary approach. Here we investigate whether twentieth century sea-level rise could have been predicted with such models given a knowledge of twentieth century global temperature increase. We find that either proxy or early tide gauge data do not hold enough information to constrain the model parameters well. However, in combination, the use of proxy and tide gauge sea-level data up to 1900 AD allows a good prediction of twentieth century sea-level rise, despite this rise being well outside the rates experienced in previous centuries during the calibration period of the model. The 90% confidence range for the linear twentieth century rise predicted bythe semi-empirical model is 13–30 cm, whereas the observed interval (using two tide gauge data sets) is 14–26 cm.Description
Keywords
climate change, model validation, projections, sea-level rise
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Citation
Bitterman , K , Rahmstorf , S , Perrette , M & Vermeer , M 2013 , ' Predictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data ' , Environmental Research Letters , vol. 8 , no. 1 , 014013 , pp. 1-8 . https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014013