Xianyao Chen, Xuebin Zhang, John A. Church, Christopher S. Watson, Matt A. King, Didier Monselesan, Benoit Legresy, Christopher Harig

Nature Climate Change

Published date June 29, 2017

The increasing rate of global mean sea-level rise during 1993–2014

  • States that global mean sea level (GMSL) has been rising at a faster rate during the satellite altimetry period (1993–2014) than previous decades, and is expected to accelerate further over the coming century
  • States that however, the accelerations observed over century and longer periods have not been clearly detected in altimeter data spanning the past two decades
  • Shows that the rise, from the sum of all observed contributions to GMSL, increases from 2.2 ± 0.3 mm yr−1 in 1993 to 3.3 ± 0.3 mm yr−1 in 2014
  • This result is in approximate agreement with observed increase in GMSL rise, 2.4 ± 0.2 mm yr−1(1993) to 2.9 ± 0.3 mm yr−1(2014), from satellite observations that have been adjusted for small systematic drift
  • Finds that the mass contributions to GMSL increase from about 50% in 1993 to 70% in 2014
  • Finds that the largest, and statistically significant, increase comes from the contribution from the Greenland ice sheet, which is less than 5% of the GMSL rate during 1993 but more than 25% during 2014