Martin Vermeer, Stefan Rahmstorf

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Published date December 22, 2009

Global sea level linked to global temperature

  • Proposes a simple relationship linking global sea-level variations on time scales of decades to centuries to global mean temperature
  • Tests this relationship on synthetic data from a global climate model for the past millennium and the next century
  • Finds that the correlation is >0.99, explaining 98% of the variance when applied to observed data of sea level and temperature for 1880–2000, and taking into account known anthropogenic hydrologic contributions to sea level