Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A reader who posts under the name “tokyoboy” sent a link to a very interesting sea level record from the Japanese Meteorological Agency. It covers the period 1906–2010, and when I first saw it I thought they’d made some mistake.
So I got their data, and plotted it up. I also got the satellite records for the area. Finally, I got records of one of the sites that the Japanese used, but I obtained it from the PSMSL records. All of them agree very well, so I am forced to assume that there are no obvious errors in the Japanese records. Figure 1 shows the results:
Figure 1. Japanese sea level records. Two records marked “Japan” are from the citation above. They are averages of long-term records since 1906 (4 sites, blue line), and shorter-term records since 1960 (16 sites, red line). Satellite records (green, 1993-2010) are from the University of Colorado interactive wizard. Wajima records (purple, 1930-2010) are from the PSMSL.
You can see why I thought there was a mistake. Sea level around Japan rose steadily from 1906 to 1950. Then it dropped for fifteen years and bounced around until 1980. Since then it has risen again, but it is about 20 mm lower than it was in 1950.
Now, I can’t find anything at all wrong with the data. The satellite record agrees with the Japanese averages, as does the PSMSL record. So we have to assume it is accurate.
But it is unlike any record I’ve seen of the global average change in sea level. That global record climbs steadily over the century.
I’m happy for suggestions and comments, as I’m in mystery over this one. It’s one of the great things about the climate, always more puzzles to solve.
w.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
mkelly says:
January 31, 2012 at 11:05 am
Sloshing.
That has my vote :). May I propose an addition? Global Sloshing. I just need a grant now…
Apropos my comment above regarding atmospheric pressure, Kolker & Hameed’s paper, Meteorologically driven trends in sea level rise makes for interesting reading.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1910/mean:12
Ian W nails it. Global sea level is almost as useless as an Average Global Temperature.
Here is the uplift of japan
http://www.glgarcs.net/figurepage/sum_landgeo/fig_amount_uplift.html
Sea floor volcanoes hold water on top of them….higher water levels
Every tsunami and eruptions shows on your plot……especially Wajima records
Looks like El Niños piling up water in the western Pacific.
PDO peaked briefly around 1940 was high from 1980 to 2000.
Wise math calls it, and isn’t it so obvious? Good call wise math – hey – would’ja like to apply with me for a grant to study it because I’m tellin ya now: the science is settled, buddy.
The sintz is settlt. Thim’s sum POWWWWWW’eRFUL PROGNOSTIFUKASHUNS Wise Math, Powwwww’ERFUL!!!
All up for a study on Wise Math (and now mine – we great minds you know – well maybe you guys DON’T know, caws YEW AIN’T CLIMATOLUJISTS!) and his FANTASTIC THEORY- it’s practically a LAW already – just sign some petition I’ll throw up when I sober up, and we’ll all be rich,
AND
we’ll be in W.I.K.I.P.E.D.I.A. as sum uv thuh smartist minn in thuh WERLD! *
*that was a paraphrase from al (the goracle) gore
Tony – P.E.A.C.E. on GOOD GUYS like you and Willis and everyone.
Your 17-year Gaussian average occults the data in the late 1950’s, making it hard to judge how well the splices correlate. Is it possible that the big downswings are a product of the transition from the 4 old sites to the 16 new sites?
The two big upswings together look like around 120mm, which isn’t too far off the 180mm in the chart of global sea rise Anthony added.
I see you chose to truncate your 17-year average line by about 4 years from either end. I love that you didn’t try to run the line to the ends of the data, but would you have a few minutes to detail the thinking behind the 4-year cutoff you chose?
Major oscillation appears to be due to the tectonic plate movements.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/JMF.htm
To mis-quote a Sarah Palin parody, “I can see the PDO from my house”.
Ian W said @ur momisugly January 31, 2012 at 11:05 am
OTOH local sea level, like local temperature is important.
Ugh, it is of course La Niñas that pile up water in the western Pacific, not El Niños as I stated above. 😉
FergalR says:
January 31, 2012 at 11:35 am
Looks like El Niños piling up water in the western Pacific
=========================================
I was going to guess wind and barometric pressure.
Hi willis
I wrote about sea level changes from the Holocene to the Romans in part 1 of my article here;
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/
My own study-backed up by several graphs by current researchers cited in my study-demonstrate that sea levels continually rise and fall by around 30cm either side of a mean average. Great care must be exercised to take into account land rise and fall-there are several links in my study to some interesting papers demonstrating the impact. All in all, we are still currently around 20cm below the sea levels experienced at several points in our recent history.
The chart you cite is one I wrote about also, it is based on a tiny numer of tide gauges mostly in the NH on to which is spliced the sarellite record a la the hockey stick. If you could zoom out to see it in historical context it reached its last peak around 1600 and has had a couple of oscillations since then, with a slow but very undramatic rise in recent decades. The current rate of sea level rise is virtually zero despite all the models and statistically the rise in the second half of the 20th Century was marginally less than in the first half according to Simon Holgate
Tonyb
It looks like AMO.
Regardless of various opinions of what the mechanisms are or aren’t, it would be very interesting to run a Fourier analysis of the curve, because I think I see at least one periodic function in it. Maybe the period could be matched to some other known period in our planet or planet-moon coupling.
“The Japanese land moves a lot and obviously not only when quakes strike…how’s that for an answer?”
Does the satelite measure relative to the land? To itself?
If I were a cynical gambling man, I’d say the “global data” was cooked, and the Japanese data is as it was recorded.
I believe studies of Tuvalu also showed that sea level had gone up and down over the years and was presently lower than in 1950. The islanders did not like the report and suppressed it from being made public. But, I think they forgot to ban writing a research paper about it.
Perhaps the steady sea level rise graph has been a tad corrupted in the same way the temperature data has been.
I tend to believe the real world data more than anything from the large organizations.
Hi Willis: The SST anomalies around Japan show some interesting variability.
http://i39.tinypic.com/23krf5g.jpg
If I had the time, I’d look into the impacts of multidecadal variability of ENSO and North Pacific Sea Level Pressure (NPI) to see how closely they relate to your Sea Level curves. Unfortunately, I’m trying to finish up a long-term project, If you were to check, invert the NINO3.4 SST anomalies first.
Is the sea level record from JMA adjusted for thermal expansion consistently with the global record? The 1950s were of course warm; in the 1970s it was cold (hence all the concerns about end of the interglacial), then in the 1980s it got warm and Hansen started strutting his stuff.
Or, referring back to your recent article on “Decimals of Precision” (URL as below) on standard error of the mean, the global plot is taken from only 23 tide gauge records worldwide – but the individual traces on the global chart appear to swing regularly at least +/- 5cms from the average. Might the Japan plot (4 sites from 1906, 16 from 1960 albeit for a much smaller area), showing the approximate 7 cm decline from 1950 to 1985, be a just statistical artefact?
URL: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/decimals-of-precision-trenberths-missing-heat/
An interesting way to study the rising or sinking of the land is to check the current level of the coastline from the previous interglacial ca 120 000 years ago. In Italy which is a seismically active area this varies from 185 meters above sea-level near Messina to 120 meters below sea level near Ravenna. So, on average, the Ravenna area has sunk about 1 mm/year during the last 100,000 years while Messina has risen about 1.5 mm/year during the same time
If we instead study Australa, famously the most tectonically stable part of the world, the variation is indeed only from + 40 meters in Tasmania, to several meters below sea-level in northern Queensland, so there the movement has probably everywhere been well below 0.5 mm/yr.
So are there any areas which haven’t moved during this time period? Perhaps. There are some largish tectonically stable blocks with an interglacial coastline about 2-3 meters above sea level, including the Gawler Block in Australia and the Tyrrhenian block in the western Mediterranean. Since such large areas never move “as a piece” as far as we know, it seems plausible that instead they haven’t moved at all.
I haven’t read all of the previous comments but the thing that comes to my mind that could be at least part of the cause is a variation in the paths or strengths of pacific ocean currents.
Just a thought.
Howzabout something similar to what’s described here yesterday….
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/30/oh-noes-wind-driven-global-warming-hot-spots/#comment-879619
was it a huge undersea heat-source/volcano/magma chamber expanding/lifting the water – were there there any geologic events in the 20s, 30s or 40s that correspond to the high point?