Evidence of acceleration in sea-level rise for the North Sea
- 1Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft, Netherlands (r.e.m.riva@tudelft.nl)
- 2Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
- 3Water Management Department, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
- 4Multi-Actor Systems Department, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
Global mean sea-level rise (SLR) has accelerated since 1900 from less than 2 mm/year during most of the century to more than 3 mm/year since 1993. At the regional scale, detection of an acceleration in SLR is difficult, because the long-term sea-level signal is obscured by large inter-annual variations with multi-year trends that are easily one order of magnitude larger than global mean values. Here, we developed a time series approach to determine whether regional SLR is accelerating based on tide gauge data. We applied the approach to eight 100-year records in the southern North Sea and detected, for the first time, a common breakpoint in the early 1990s. The mean SLR rate at the eight stations increases from 1.7±0.3 mm/year before the breakpoint to 2.7±0.4 mm/year after the breakpoint (95% confidence interval), which is unprecedented in the regional instrumental record. These findings are robust provided that the record starts before 1970 and ends after 2015.
How to cite: Riva, R., Steffelbauer, D., Timmermans, J., Kwakkel, J., and Bakker, M.: Evidence of acceleration in sea-level rise for the North Sea, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-2577, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-2577, 2022.
