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Sea level rise is usually one of the first things associated with climate change. However, our capabilities to reconstruct historical water levels of the 20th century are limited. The most important reason for this limitation is the scarcity of long-term observations. Water levels relative to the coast, also called relative water levels can be measured by tide gauges. But tide gauge stations, in particular ones with long records, are unequally distributed along global coastlines. Another source of observations since the 1990th are satellite measurements of the sea surface heights (satellite altimetry) that overcome the problem of unequal spatial distribution of measurements but have only one datapoint per month. A third source are so called water level reanalyses that use hourly climate data to model coastal water levels.

We developed a reconstruction of hourly coastal water levels along global coastlines, called HCC, with monthly resolution from 1900 to 2015 and hourly resolution after 1979 (Treu et al. 2023) that incorporates the different sources of sea level observations. Alongside those reconstructed factual water levels we provide counterfactual water levels without long-term sea level change since 1900. With both datasets it is possible to look into single storm events which happen on time scales of hours or days and compare the factual water levels with counterfactual water levels representing a world without sea level change since 1900.

The performance of HCC was evaluated for the monthly dataset at 705 stations of the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL, Woodworth and Player 2003). This database has the advantage of extensive quality checking but is only available at a monthly time scale. To evaluate HCC on daily and hourly time scales we use 714 stations from the GESLA-2 database (Woodworth et al. 2016). Note that we do not have a one to one matching of PSMSL and GESLA-2 stations.

Note: the figures below are linked interactively. You may also consult single country articles (accessible via the left panel) to inspect stations for a single country.

Tide-gauge locations

PSMSL (monthly, ) and GESLA (hourly, ) tide-gauge locations. Zoom and click on one station to display the data on the figures below.

FIG 1 / Created by M. Perrette with Leaflet | Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Map data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL.

Long-term trends (PSMSL)

Long-term, annual data from PSMSL at station . The vertical dashed line represents the year for high-frequency data on the next figure (it can be moved interactively).

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FIG 2 / Created by M. Perrette with d3.js

High-frequency time-series (GESLA)

High-frequency GESLA data at the station . A full year is shown on top, and a week's worth of data is shown on the bottom panel. The vertical dashed line show the date (it can be moved interactively). The top panel is shown by default as daily average to smooth out the tides, but the averaging can be lifted. Frequency of top-panel: daily, hourly (choose).

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FIG 3 / Created by M. Perrette with d3.js

References

Treu, Simon, Sanne Muis, Sönke Dangendorf, Thomas Wahl, Julius Oelsmann, Stefanie Heinicke, Katja Frieler, and Matthias Mengel. 2023. “Reconstruction of Hourly Coastal Water Levels and Counterfactuals without Sea Level Rise for Impact Attribution.” Submitted to ESSD.

Woodworth, P. L., J. R. Hunter, M. Marcos, P. Caldwell, M. Menéndez, and I. Haigh. 2016. “Towards a Global Higher-Frequency Sea Level Dataset.” Geoscience Data Journal 3 (2): 50–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.42.

Woodworth, P. L., and R. Player. 2003. “The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: An Update to the 21stCentury.” Journal of Coastal Research 19 (2): 287–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4299170.

Affiliations

¹ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

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Hourly sea level dataset

Tide-gauge locations

Long-term trends (PSMSL)

High-frequency time-series (GESLA)

References

Affiliations