We’ve been waiting for the UC web page to be updated with the most recent sea level data. It finally has been updated for 2008. It looks like the steady upward trend of sea level as measured by satellite has stumbled since 2005. The 60 day line in blue tells the story.
From the University of Colorado web page:
Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Jason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm.
They also say:
Long-term mean sea level change is a variable of considerable interest in the studies of global climate change. The measurement of long-term changes in global mean sea level can provide an important corroboration of predictions by climate models of global warming. Long term sea level variations are primarily determined with two different methods.
Yes, I would agree, it is indeed a variable of considerable interest. The question now is, how is it linked to global climate change (aka global warming) if CO2 continues to increase, and sea level does not?
There’s an interesting event in October 2005 that I’ll come back to in a couple of days.
(h/t to Mike Bryant)
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Gee, another divergence problem?
Cooling sea perhaps since 2005? It would seem to fit with La Nina too…
Must be due to global warming, causing increased evaporation. If we’re not frying, we’ll be drowning, due to increased rainfall, or buried in snow. But, of course there will also be more extreme drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, species extinction, no more haggis, etc.
Cooling seas? Has accumulated ocean heat been radiated back out into the atmosphere now after (or as a result of) all those strong el ninos in recent years?
Making climatic trends over 3 years is at the best naive, not to say misleading.
“Look at this! No rise between 1992 and 1995. Proof there’s no warming. The same holds for 1998-2000 where the levels actually decreased!!! But … Wait… How is it possible then that sea levels increased between 1992 and 2000 ? ”
Short term and long term. Never heard of short-scale variability?
I wish the data was shown indicating its source; Jason 1 or Jason 2. AVISO has similar plots. Here is their plot like UC without seasonal variations being removed, http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J1_Global_IB_RWT_PGR_NoAdjust.png . Here is their plot with seasonal variations being removed, http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/ , the end of this guy is dropping like a rock.
Bruce Cobb (09:19:42) :
No haggis???!!!?!??!!
Talk about alarmist!
That’s just crazy talk. Let’s not get carried away.
JimB
Hmmm. If sea level has risen 120 meters since the end of the last glacial advance, about 15,000 years ago, we’ve experienced an average of 80mm/decade rise in sea level over that period. According to the graph above, we’ve seen an increase of 32 mm during the past decade, so the recent increase is about 40% of the long term rate of sea level rise.
I’m confused; is the 60 day smoothing the blue zig zag or is it the nice black straight line, which seems to be walking off the data.
Is everything in climatology supposed to match some straight line; is that how they get a 200 ft sea level rise in 100 years ?
Is the point scatter considered to be real data, or is it system noise ? I imagine that a good bit of it is simply noise, but the blue zig zag still leaves us with the same question; is the blue trace still random noise or is it true (10 day) change in sea level; and if the latter what is the change mechanism.
But pretty amazing that you can get a few mm data from a satellite looking at something as shifty as the oceans.
George
Aviso took over operation of Jason-1 while they were calibrating the new Jason-2 satellite (I think they have turned Jason-2 over now). There were some technical problems with Jason-1 so they haven’t been updating the data but it seems the problems are worked out now and they have been updating the data for a month or so. (Note the error correction resulted in a slightly reduced overall sea level trend.)
The Aviso data is updated to the end of the third quarter while I think the UC chart is only to the end of the summer.
At this link you can get the newest sea level data. Click “time series” rather than map and select the other options such as which satellite to use, which one of the processing algorithms to use.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/altimetry-data-and-images/index.html
There are some strange things going with sea level. Note there is an overall seasonal signal which peaks at the end of the year. So a high level in the July data indicates there was a rapid increase in sea level rise from the spring to the summer but it has now dropped like a stone.
3.3 mm per year = almost 13 inches per hundred years…
The sky is falling!!!
This is a serious problem for policymakers, because sea level rise is supposed to be the major threat from AGW.
BTW, have you noticed the Sun has been blank again for a while? We are supposed to be a major uptick right now as the cycle starts…
http://www.spaceweather.com/
OK Mr. Hansen, we’ll accept your resignation now.
All those letters behind your name mean nothing if you are wrong.
And you are committing an even greater wrong if you are not man enough to admit it.
Flanagan: “Making climatic trends over 3 years is at the best naive, not to say misleading.”
Your comment is confusing. Would you quote the exact passage in the article that says 3 years constitutes anything other than a short-term trend (as stated in the title)?
Barak Obama was right – the sea DID stop rising when he was elected!
“Making climatic trends over 3 years is at the best naive, not to say misleading.”
15 years isn’t very long, either. And ~34cm./100 years doesn’t exactly spell “catastrophe” to me.
Hi Mr. Watts,
I know you moderate these comments, and I couldn’t find a contact item, so I guess I’ll use this.
Several people have been asking “what happens if you only use the CRN 1 or 1&2 stations to do the temperature trend.” Actually, I spent a bunch of time last year helping a local science student to do exactly that, as part of his Science Fair project (a project that won him a trip to Atlanta, Georgia in the national competition.) The large part of his project was showing that different surfaces cause vast differences in temperature, but part of it was taking the USHCN temperatures and then attempting to apply an adjustment to the “bad” stations for the type of material they were sited at. As part of this, he downloaded all the stations from surfacestations and identified the types of bias visible in the photos and then applied “corrections” (sorry for the Hansen term there) to the items.
But, as another part, he ran the heat maps using just the CRN 1 and CRN 2 stations.
I’m sure I can get this data for you if you want (he actually used my server as a backup database for all the data.)
Just thought I’d drop the offer.
Oh, and if you need a new article, you can always play “Spot the mistakes” in the graph on this page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather
My favorite is that they claim the graph represents “deviation from the 1960-1990 average” yet every value between 1960 and 1990 (save two tiny positive values) fall far below the “zero” mark.)
Jeff
Jim,
Let’s be really careful about resignations and wrong. Yes, Hansen should go, not because he’s wrong, but because he’s lost all hope of objectivity. The best of the best are often wrong, but they don’t keep beating a recently deceased equine. They accept the fact, and change methods or viewpoints and move on.
Hansen has not. That’s the reason he needs to find other work – digging ditches would be a good start, the man needs to get his hands dirty.
Mike
Jeff,
And if you look at the comments on that Guardian article (a very left wing paper), you’ll see how many people think that AGW is a big con. The average citizen doesn’t like being taken for a ride, not when he’s paying for it and it is going in the wrong direction. Time will show the truth.
The declining sea level is most likely due to the renewal of the ice shelfs but the only one that would have a great impact is that at the South Pole since the ice at the North Pole displaces it’s own volume of water. You could never guess that when you hear them talking that the planet has a fever… again with no correlation whatsoever with the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
But talking of concentration, a concentration is based on the relative quantity of one specie to the total of the sum. So, since we are cooling, the concentration of CO2 will rise because less and less water is in the atmosphere. The absolute humidity is always smaller in cold air due to “forced” precipitation.
Your monitor may vary…
The blue zigzag line is the 60 day smoothing. The straight black line apparently is the “rate” whose definition is given in the lower right area of the graph.
And if I’m thinking of the correct birds, Jason-2 was put in an orbit several miles behind Jason-1 so both were getting almost the same data during Jason-2 calibration. However, I think Jason’s data is calibrated against tide gauge data, so the satellite data is not fully independent of factors which affect tide gauges.
It seems to me that the only reference point for measuring sea level is the center of the Earth. How accurately can that be determined.? Plus or minus 3-4 mm? It seems that sea levels tend to be local and not global. Nature continues to display an irreverence to the religion of AGW and the computer models of Hansen and Schmidt (of Crane, Poole and Schmidt?).
To most people sea level is the point at which the surface of the land and sea meet. Officially known as the sea level datum plane, it is a reference point used in measuring land elevation and water depths. It refers to the vertical distance from the surface of the ocean to some fixed point on land, or a reference point defined by people. Sea level became a standardized measure in 1929. Mean sea level is the average of the changes in the level of the ocean over time, and it is to this measure that we refer when we use the term sea level.
Constant motion of water in the oceans causes sea levels to vary.
Mean sea level can also be influenced by air pressure.
Increases in temperature can cause sea level to rise.
Sea level can be raised or lowered by tectonic processes.
About 30,000 years ago, sea level was nearly the same as it is today. During the ice age 15,000 years ago, it dropped and has been rising ever since.
Since the Kyoto Treaty was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, sea levels have been rising precipitously. (:-)
Anthony,
“There’s an interesting event in October 2005 that I’ll come back to in a couple of days.”
Are you talk about the drop in the Planetery Index around that time?
Not sure if I see a three year short term trend though. There seems to be some similar events back in the record. Overall rise seem to go in steps. That 1997-98 El nino seems to have raised the level in one step. Are the other spikes El nino events too?
Phillip
“And if you look at the comments on that Guardian article (a very left wing paper), you’ll see how many people think that AGW is a big con. The average citizen doesn’t like being taken for a ride, not when he’s paying for it and it is going in the wrong direction. Time will show the truth.”
Want to see what I got landed with tonight.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7767061.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7767910.stm
Worse than all that my haggis plant died due to the cold.
But worse than all that.
Sea level is rising at St Andrews golf course.
“Professor Jan Bebbington, director of the St Andrews Sustainability Institute” says so. A Professor!!! Well you cannot get better than that, well maybe an expert.
And we are all going to turn into “car-sharing nation of vegetarians”.
(Who thought California was off the wall?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7666809.stm
So there sea level is not rising.
A professor says so!!