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hatrack

(59,442 posts)
Sat Jan 17, 2015, 11:09 AM Jan 2015

Oops! Rate Of Acceleration In Sea Level Rise Over 20th Century Faster Than Expected

The acceleration of the rate of sea level rise over the past couple decades is even higher than scientists had thought, according to a new study that uses a novel method to estimate the global rise of the oceans.

The reason? The rate of rise across the 20th century has actually been overestimated — by as much as 30 percent — meaning there’s been a bigger jump in sea level rise rates from the beginning of the 1900s to now than previously thought. “The acceleration over the 20th century is larger than we thought, and that’s a problem,” particularly for coastal communities, study author Carling Hay, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Rutgers University, said.

EDIT

Hay didn’t actually set out to challenge these established estimates of sea level rise. She and her team were hoping to find the telltale signatures of glacier melt in tide gauge records, using statistical methods that hadn’t been applied to the issue of sea level rise before. They figured out that they could use those same methods to estimate global sea level rise. When they tried it, they realized “that we didn’t get the same thing” as the established estimates, Hay said.

Instead, their range was lower, from 1.0 to 1.4 millimeters per year from 1901 to 1990. “We were definitely surprised,” Hay said. Thinking perhaps she had made an error, “I spent a while looking for bugs in my code.” But when the team tried a different method, they got the same numbers.

Those lower estimates of sea level rise up to 1990 also happened to solve a seeming problem with previous estimates. When scientists tallied the contributions to sea level rise from glacial melt, thermal expansion and other sources, they didn’t match the global average rise. But Hay’s estimates did match the tally. The team’s new estimates for the period since 1990 also matched those from the more accurate satellite records. If Hay and her colleagues are right, what that means is that combining their new lower estimate of sea level rise until 1990 with the higher rate since then gives an overall faster acceleration of the rate of that rise since the early 20th century.

EDIT

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/sea-level-rise-accelerating-18543

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Oops! Rate Of Acceleration In Sea Level Rise Over 20th Century Faster Than Expected (Original Post) hatrack Jan 2015 OP
FTE is the new "no one could have predicted" nt eppur_se_muova Jan 2015 #1
nobody could have predicted *that* phantom power Jan 2015 #2
I use a similar expression ThoughtCriminal Jan 2015 #3
Who could have predicted? Helen Borg Jan 2015 #4

phantom power

(25,966 posts)
2. nobody could have predicted *that*
Sat Jan 17, 2015, 12:16 PM
Jan 2015

... except everybody on E/E, or anybody else who was paying attention


ThoughtCriminal

(14,011 posts)
3. I use a similar expression
Sat Jan 17, 2015, 01:18 PM
Jan 2015

"Good news about our situation: the rate of deterioration is not accelerating as fast as it was."

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