HR: 0800h
AN: OS21B-1233    [Abstracts]
TI: Sea Level did not Accelerate in the Last Quarter of the 20th Century
AU: * Galvin, C
EM: galvincoastal@juno.com
AF: Cyril Galvin, Coastal Engineer, Box 623, Springfield, VA 22150 United States
AB: The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL)collects quality-controlled sea levels from tide gages on all seas, and tabulates them at www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/psmsl(underline)individual(underline)stations.html. I examined annual average sea levels (Ra in column 6) for generally open-coast tide gages having data at the years defining quarter points in the 20th century: 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, 2000. Gages lacking data for a given date, say 1975, were assumed to qualify if they had data for one year, plus or minus, of the missing data, i. e., for 1974 or 1976 in this example. This examination of data from gages on all seas identified 54 gages with data for the last three of the five dates, which included 26 gages with data for the last four of the five dates, which included 7 gages with data for all five dates. This means that sea-level change during the last quarter (Q4) of the 20th century could be compared at 54 sites with sea-level change in Q3, at 26 sites with sea- level change in Q2, and at 7 sites with sea-level change in Q1, providing 87 tests of the widely reported acceleration in rate of sea-level rise at the end of the 20th century. If sea level is rising at an accelerating rate, then sea-level rise during Q4 should almost always exceed sea-level rises in Q1, Q2, and Q3 of the 20th century. Of the 87 tests, 44 showed more sea-level rise in Q4, and 43 showed less sea-level rise in Q4, compared to the earlier quarters. Thus there is no evidence for an accelerating rise in sea level at the end of the 20th century from these quality-controlled data. The data do indicate that sea-level changes are synchronized over long reaches of shoreline (Sturges, 1990), and sites where gages are imbedded in deposits of clastic sediment have higher apparent sea-level rise attributable to sediment compaction. Beach erosion on the East Coast of the U.S. is widely attributed to the acceleration of sea-level rise, yet all 8 long-term gages at this coast show significantly LESS sea-level rise during Q4, when the reported beach erosion increased, compared to during Q3, Q2, or Q1.
DE: 4546 Nearshore processes
DE: 4560 Surface waves and tides (1255)
DE: 3020 Littoral processes
DE: 3022 Marine sediments--processes and transport
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting