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Estimating Sea Level Allowances for Atlantic Canada using the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.pdf (1.45 MB)

Estimating sea-level allowances for Atlantic Canada using the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC

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posted on 2023-05-18, 20:23 authored by Zhai, L, Greenan, BJW, John HunterJohn Hunter, James, TS, Han, G, MacAuley, P, Henton, JA
Sea-level allowances at 22 tide-gauge sites along the east coast of Canada are determined based on projections of regional sea-level rise for the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) and on the statistics of historical tides and storm surges (storm tides). The allowances, which may be used for coastal infrastructure planning, increase with time during the twenty-first century through a combination of mean sea-level rise and the increased uncertainty of future projections with time. The allowances show significant spatial variation, mainly a consequence of strong regionally varying relative sea-level change as a result of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). A methodology is described for replacement of the GIA component of the AR5 projection with global positioning system (GPS) measurements of vertical crustal motion; this significantly decreases allowances in regions where the uncertainty of the GIA models is large. For RCP8.5 with GPS data incorporated and for the 1995–2100 period, the sea-level allowances range from about 0.5 m along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to more than 1 m along the coast of Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland.

History

Publication title

Atmosphere - Ocean

Volume

53

Issue

5

Pagination

476-490

ISSN

0705-5900

Department/School

Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Publisher

Canadian Meteorological Oceanographic Soc

Place of publication

150 Louis Pasteur Pvt., Ste 112, Mcdonald Building, Ottawa, Canada, Ontario, K1N 6N5

Rights statement

© 2015 Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Climate change models

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