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Twentieth-century global-mean sea level rise: is the whole greater than the sum of the parts?
Citation
Gregory, JM and White, NJ and Church, JA and Bierkens, MFP and Box, JE and van den Broeke, MR and Cogley, JG and Fettweis, X and Hanna, E and Huybrechts, P and Konikow, LF and Leclercq, PW and Marzeion, B and Oerlemans, J and Tamisiea, ME and Wada, Y and Wake, LM and van de Wal, RSW, Twentieth-century global-mean sea level rise: is the whole greater than the sum of the parts?, Journal of Climate, 26, (13) pp. 4476-4499. ISSN 0894-8755 (2013) [Refereed Article]
Copyright Statement
Copyright 2013 American Meteorological Society
DOI: doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00319.1
Abstract
Confidence in projections of global-mean sea level rise (GMSLR) depends on an ability to account forGMSLR
during the twentieth century. There are contributions from ocean thermal expansion, mass loss from glaciers and
ice sheets, groundwater extraction, and reservoir impoundment. Progress has been made toward solving the
‘‘enigma’’ of twentieth-century GMSLR, which is that the observedGMSLRhas previously been found to exceed
the sum of estimated contributions, especially for the earlier decades. The authors propose the following: thermal
expansion simulated by climatemodels may previously have been underestimated because of their not including
volcanic forcing in their control state; the rate of glacier mass loss was larger than previously estimated and was
not smaller in the first half than in the second half of the century; the Greenland ice sheet could have made
a positive contribution throughout the century; and groundwater depletion and reservoir impoundment, which
are of opposite sign, may have been approximately equal inmagnitude. It is possible to reconstruct the time series
of GMSLR from the quantified contributions, apart from a constant residual term, which is small enough to be
explained as a long-term contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet. The reconstructions account for the observation
that the rate of GMSLR was not much larger during the last 50 years than during the twentieth century as
a whole, despite the increasing anthropogenic forcing. Semiempiricalmethods for projectingGMSLR depend on
the existence of a relationship between global climate change and the rate of GMSLR, but the implication of the
authors’ closure of the budget is that such a relationship is weak or absent during the twentieth century.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | sea level, in situ oceanic observations, ship observations surface observations, climate models |
| Research Division: | Earth Sciences |
| Research Group: | Climate change science |
| Research Field: | Climate change processes |
| Objective Division: | Environmental Policy, Climate Change and Natural Hazards |
| Objective Group: | Understanding climate change |
| Objective Field: | Climate change models |
| UTAS Author: | Church, JA (Dr John Church) |
| ID Code: | 122066 |
| Year Published: | 2013 |
| Web of Science® Times Cited: | 147 |
| Deposited By: | CRC-Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems |
| Deposited On: | 2017-10-30 |
| Last Modified: | 2017-11-07 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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