Dave Burton writes:
Those NASA guys are tricky.
Click the “Update: Sea level change / Ocean rising at 3.42 mm per year” link in their latest Newsletter and you’ll see the big, bold “3.42 mm/yr” near the top of the web page, and two very similar-looking graphs of sea-level: one from satellites, and one from tide stations.
Since only one rate of sea-level rise is shown, the casual observer is likely to think that the same 3.42 mm/yr rate applies to both graphs. Here’s a screenshot:
http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
But the 3.42 mm/yr rate does not apply to both graphs. Look closer at the scales, and do the arithmetic, and you’ll realize that the 2nd graph is actually showing a slope of only about half that claimed 3.42 mm/yr.
Since the late 1920s it shows a slope of about 1.8 mm/yr, with no evidence of acceleration. But those tricky NASA guys scaled it to look like the slope is about the same as the first graph. It’s pretty obvious why they didn’t show a rate of sea-level rise for that graph.
What’s more, the second graph is not really just from tide gauge data; it’s from tide gauge data inflated by a +0.3 mm/yr GIA “adjustment,” to subtract off the rate by which the sinking ocean floor is hypothesized to reduce sea-level rise. The real rate of coastal sea-level rise from averaged tide gauge measurements is only about 1.4-1.5 mm/yr (under six inches per century), and that rate hasn’t increased since the late 1920s.
What’s more, even NASA’s first graph, of satellite altimetry measurements, is deceptive. Like the second graph, it shows a rate which has been inflated by the addition of model-derived GIA, plus by combining the various satellite measurements it also hides the wide variations in rates measured by different satellites.
AVISO has a much more informative graph of satellite altimetry measurements, showing a rate of +2.87 mm/yr, without GIA adjustment, here:
Warmest regards,
Dave
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Winston Smith now works for NASA 🙂
strange that NASA uses satellites for sea level, but ignores them for temperature. since NASA is supposed to be about space, even has “space” in the name, why doesn’t it use satellites for both sea level and temperature? why does it still rely on ground stations that give only partial coverage of temperature?
It is also very suspicious why the CSIRO tide gauge graph cuts off in 1995 , just about the point where the satellite graph starts.
Does the CSIRO graph really end in 1995 or have they just truncated it avoid publishing two totally contradictory graphs, covering the same dates and avoiding commenting the fact is their text.
Or why even do they not edit out clear UHI from the actual environmental heat record then keep the variance information as separate data instead of adding it into the actual average temperature?
The institution which achieved the greatest engineering triumph in human history has been co-opted by charlatans and liars. NASA’s the same as any other government institution, such that it often lives on as a vampire after it’s mandate has shrunk or vanished. How did NASA react to shrinking space exploration budgets? They adopted the climate scare narrative to keep that juicey government money flowing.
After the space shuttle blew up, Russia (hahaha) now services space station stuff for us. We are supposed to hate and fear Russians, of course, and this is never mentioned in our news media that Russia alone has access to the space station. Meanwhile, NASA worries about being warmer and I assure everyone, Russia does NOT worry about being warmer, Canada stupidly does this.
It snowed here on my mountain twice this month and it is snowing hard outside today and will snow tomorrow and it is bitter cold winter here and in Canada. I hope the Canadian government is happy, they demanded longer colder winters and we are getting this even in spring now.
GRound station temperature readings can be off by plus 7 or 9 degrees C!!
DO we know these massively incorrect readings are corrected?? NO we do
Not because the adjustments are never published!!
Emsnews said “it is bitter cold winter in Canada”.
Afraid not dear …. 20C in the shade on my deck and the wife just texted me that Calgary is 22C. Chicks were skiing in bikini tops at Fernie today. http://skifernie.com/conditions/mountain-cam/
Canada is a big country and the best is to the west 😉
Greg, noaa’s tidesandcurrents chart for Sydney (Fort Denison) cuts out at about 2010, after showing a remarkably steady rise of 0.65 mm/year for a very long period. Fort Denison is still there.
Look, guys, one must operate in the real world. At least they showed a graph, albeit studiously untrended. That’s more than they usually do. It’s hardball in the scientific community peer-review game. The first thing a manager wants to know is how good is his second baseman’s false tag and how good is his ace’s spitter.
Best way to beat that is just do it straight up. All that stuff they do merely gives them an edge. And if one’s game is up to snuff, those efforts fall short.
Another hack you may or may not have noticed is that they selected a start point so as to ensure a predominantly positive PDO.
“NOAA has 240 tide gauges globally, and 86% of them show less sea level rise….”
I can’t for the life of me…..figured out why this paper is constantly ignored
It’s accurate,,,,even with their error bars….not one single person has disputed it
…and yet, it’s never quoted when the discussion is tide gauges
A full 65% of tide gauges…the majority….show no sea level rise at all….and it’s only the minority 35% of tide gauges that show any sea level rise at all
Why would anyone think sea levels are rising?
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdfels/wpapers/Tide%20gauge%20location.pdf
Why paper/imaginary sea level rises are relentlessly touted: you already know that. C’mon. Science has nothing t do with it!
I agree.
L, you cannot use most tide gauges without correcting for non-geosationariness. Juneau Alaska ( in my ebook essay PseudoPrecision) has minus 10mm/yr due to tectonic uplift. Boston is lower, and Norfolk is higher, than the Battery even though that is less than 700 miles of Atlantic coastline. Boston is isostatically rebounding from the weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and Norfolk is subsiding in roughly equal measure. And the Battery happens to sit in the middle almost geographically, and actually on tide gauge metrics. There are maybe 60-80 long record global tide gauges that are sufficiently geostationary to provide a differential GPS confirmed SLR. Something maybe around 2mm/yr. The sat alt 2.8-3 is an unreconcilable accuracy/precision thing with a different measurement system.
Rud,
Who lives in Norfolk (raises hand, waiving wildly)? Streets flooded during northeasters and summer downpours when I was a kid, Streets flood during northeasters and summer downpours now. Never took out my ruler to measure it, but don’t see any buildings floating away after 50+ years.
“you cannot use most tide gauges without correcting for non-geosationariness. ”
…read the paper
If you live beside the ocean, the only tide gauge that matters is the one nearest you. Who gives a rip if 100 miles away the land is sinking fast, while you are enjoying steady sea levels? Like global average temperature, global average sea level is impossible to measure. Anyone who earns a living by making claims about either is a charlatan.
L, you cannot use most tide gauges without correcting for non-geosationariness.
Same exact thing applies to sat data. In fact, it has been averred that sat data is pinned on and adjusted to points that are subsiding.
Latitude,
“A full 65% of tide gauges…the majority….show no sea level rise at all….and it’s only the minority 35% of tide gauges that show any sea level rise at all
Why would anyone think sea levels are rising?”
Because of arithmetic. If 65% of something is stable and 35% of it is rising, the total is rising.
you did not read the paper…..it does not say 65% are stable
No, I just glanced at the paper, but I was commenting on what you wrote. I will read the peruse the paper when I have more time. It appears interesting, if, apparently, inconsequential.
….I didn’t say they were stable either….
The paper says 65% show no sea level rise….that’s including the ones that show sea levels falling
I don’t think sea level rise is determined by a show of hands. Gauges are not sited in a geographically even spread. We know there are large tectonic shifts that are often larger than actual sea level variation.
The percentage does not really tell us much objectively. That’s why.
Tide gauges tells us a great deal Tide gauges exist where we live. (Think about that) Some are rising, some a lowering. Satellites are not accurate, but full of false precision. For two decades scientist argued about the Palmdale bulge, land in a desert. Their satellite derived measurements varied by about 1000 mm.
I heard part (couldn’t stand the whole thing) of an NPR broadcast the other day The interviewed scientist (and another sycophant NGO individual ) had developed a model (based on a model based on a model of a model) that the ocean would raise at least 1 meter or 6′ (moderator) in the next 100 years. 10 meters or 50′ (moderator) in 500. They then proceeded to learnedly discuss what a disaster that would be. No discussion of the accuracy of the initial models. A classic SISO operation but funded anyway. Gotta love taxpayers paying for quality stuff like this.
That might have been the NPR broadcast my wife heard. I figured it was probably based on the Guardian article that David Middleton debunked here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/01/oh-noes-sea-level-rise-to-double-again/
/Mr Lynn
Goddard/Heller is on to this one as well along the same lines as above http://realclimatescience.com/2016/04/nasa-sea-level-fraud-update/
yikes.
So the depth of the ocean at the Marianas Trench has gone from 10,994,000 mm to 10,994,080 mm?
Are they saying the oceans are deeper
or just that the top of the oceans are higher?
/huh?
They are saying we should be skeert.
They’re saying that when the great northern ice sheets melted ca. 7K – 10K years ago, raising the oceans, the weight of that additional water caused the ocean floor to slowly sink — so slowly, in fact, that it is still sinking, to this day.
It certainly sounds reasonable. Prof. Peltier estimates, from computer models, that the ongoing sinking of the ocean floor causes an annual reduction in global sea-level of 0.3 mm/yr, and that seems to be the figure that just about everyone uses, though there’s no way to check it.
When NASA (and others) add that 0.3 mm/yr to sea-level measurements, the sum is potentially useful for water mass budget calculations, and that sort of thing, but it’s not truly sea-level. It’s what what sea-level probably would be, if the ocean floor were not sinking.
exactly Dave…..
Maybe the earth is shrinking due to all that CO2. Tug lightspeed tp the rescue!
‘It’s what what sea-level probably would be, if the ocean floor were not sinking.’
But if it is sinking, it is sinking. It is the net rise we are to be scared of. Unless they think the alleged sinking is going to suddenly stop.
I submit they have no idea the size of the basin, nor it’s changes.
It isn’t even the tide gauges that we should pay attention to but the local highest astronomical tide on known infrastructure.
I live in a geodetically stable area and HATs are in recent years between 4 and 10 inches lower than they were 70 years ago.
Local sea hydraulics have not been altered in any way.
SLR is a little like justice. If it’s happening it should be seen to be happening.
And I’ve yet to meet anyone who can point to geodetically stable marine infrastructure and claim SLR over their lifetime with a straight face.
Cutting off the “ground data” at 2000 in this context is a firm sign of consciousness of guilt of the purveyors of this anti-science.
Exactly – I noticed that. Why would they do that – the data continues to accumulate every year.
Would somebody explain how NASA comes up with sea level rise data in millimeters or fractions of a millimeter from a satellite? I would think that requires at the start knowing the satellite altitude and position to within a millimeter or a fraction of a millimeter. Then of course one needs some means to average wave heights and likely much more that I am unaware of.
Then of course if these altimeter satellites are so reliable (despite not even being able to reconcile the results of different satellites), why are the temperature satellites drifting in such a way?
The reported precision of the measurements is ~1 in 23 billion. Not bad for measurements of a surface which is never at rest.
firetoice2014, the precision might be very good – but the accuracy may well be very poor. Precision and accuracy, using an analogy to shooting at a target: Precision means getting all your hits very close to each other, accuracy means how close to the real center of target you actually hit. Don’t get fooled by very high precision, it is often achieved by tossing accuracy out the window.
The satellites use the GPS frame as their reference and repeated measurements, relative to the frame, are averaged over time to remove signals such as wave action as well as increase the precision.
But GPS does not provide me position data of my boat and car at less than a few feet of accuracy. Perhaps DoD gets better data than I do – correction: They undoubtedly do – but still a fraction of a millimeter?? Averaging won’t do the trick unless one knows the bias, second by second. Do they??
Still have doubts.
You’re not the only person to wonder that, DHR. Physicist Willie Soon discusses the problems starting at 17:37 in this very informative
hour-long lecture.
At least some of the people at NASA are aware of the problems, too. To address some of the problems, in 2011 NASA proposed (and re-proposed in 2014 / 2015) a new mission called the Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace (GRASP). The proposal was discussed on WUWT here, and its implications for measuring sea-level were discussed on WUWT here.
Are the satilites compensated for sun and moon gravity variations on their orbit height?
I believe so, yes.
Well, it is actually even more complicated than orbit. The sats use radar echo return. Problem 1. The sea surface is not flat. It is wavey. And waveyness varies with wind. Problem 2. Return echo is retarded by delta humidity. Which of course varies with weather. So, Jason 2 spec was a ‘pixel’ repeateable reliability of <3 mm/yr, amd an admissible instrument drift of +/-1mm/yr. Accuracy, not so much. Just citing the published Jason 2 sat specs from NASA.
Sea level rise is also said to be augmented by ground water extraction adding some 0 .8 mm a year.
http://www.waterworld.com/articles/wwi/print/volume-25/issue-5/groundwater-development-flow-modeling/groundwater-depletion-linked-to-rising.html
Extraction has accelerated over the last fifty years due to a greater population and more demand for irrigation. So the fact that there hasn’t been a noticeable increase in the tide gauge level rate since the 1920’s is surprising.
Tonyb
Ground water extraction is implicated in land form subsidence. Could this affect tide gauges? Hmmm, Could Be.
documented example?:
http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/z-subsidence.html
It’s “computer enhanced” reality.
Like the real thing, but scarier.
Who can help me here. If they add .3mm/yr GIA adjustment, Does that mean they add 0.3mm to the level the 1st year, 0.6mm to the level the second year, 0.9mm to the level the third year and so on?
I’m reading it as adding 0.3mm each year to the supposedly otherwise “unadjusted” data.
Which would mean that the rate of change of the sea floor is “0” and always 0.3mm/yr.
I’m having my doubts about that.
Yup. 0.3 (or 0.4) mm/yr every year. 0.3 is the U. Colorado computer SWAG.
great….no wonder no one can see it
‘ model-derived GIA, ‘ I think these people lie so much and so often , that now they do not even realise they are doing it . As long as they get the results they ‘need’ how they get them means nothing at all.
But to give them credit they know its the ‘headline’ the press will run with , and there is no way they are going to ask the type of questioned raised by this blog.
So that is ‘mission objective achieved’
The so called 4th estate is now completely corrupt. The only “investigative” journalism done by newspapers these days is politically motivated (e.g. The Washington Post’s reporting of Watergate). I haven’t seen real critical investigation in decades, maybe never.
Suppose the sea level rise is really annual decay of the satellite orbit? Then what?
Prestidigitation! Smoke, mirrors and misdirection. Magic is an essential tool of the Propagandists. This is an excellent example of Bureaucratic abracadabra.
The fastest sea level rise measured from satellites has come the last 5 years with over 5mm pr year. This support the idea of accelleration. But tide gauge data is not presented for the last years. It is up to everybody to try to find out. It is a shame that the tide gauge presentation stops in 2000, as it is impossible to compare the last years with satellites. With all the effort laid down in all kind of measurements, why this neglect of tide gauges.
Latitude: Tide gauges show sea level rise, no doubt. The gauges (the ground) have vertical movements that are measured by gps. So it is easy to correct the measurements with the movement of the stations.
“So it is easy to correct the measurements with the movement of the stations.”
How? Supposedly there’s orbital decay AND possible uplift or subsidence, from tectonic or other sources. So…how is it easy to tease those apart to yield an accurate and precise net change?
Gps measurements of a fixed point on land is a well proven technology. Tectonic movements are measured many places, Monitoring volcanoes, earth quakes, land slides etc. And the tide gauges are fixed in the ocean floor and is moved with ground uplifts or subsidence. So sea level change (relative sea level -RSL) is measured mean water level minus land subsdence.
Unfortunately, measuring vertical land motion that precisely with GPS is problematic. The Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace (GRASP) mission, if it ever flies, should help.
@ur momisugly daveburton, April 7 4;36 pm, “The Geodetic Reference Antenna in SPace (GRASP)”
“GRASPing, is all they will be doing.
Latitude: Tide gauges show sea level rise, no doubt.
Actually no they don’t……read the paper
“The gauges (the ground) have vertical movements that are measured by gps”
Satellites are affected by gravity….sea floor mountains and volcanoes increase gravity over them…
..obviously that persistent positive anomaly in Celebes Sea can’t be really increasing every year
it’s an artifact of gravity…but correcting for it would destroy their sea levels rising meme
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00KeNTPWQnZhku/Water-Slide-Hill-Side-WS-038-.jpg
Check http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/map.html. The Battery and many many other gauges throughout the world have data well past the year 2000. The plots available to me for the long term data suggest the data go up to 2015 or so, but the scale is so corse that its hard to tell exactly. And almost to a man (or woman) the world-wide long term gauges show a very steady rise with no knee anywhere except for Manila where there is a knee circa 1960. A curious case. Volcano soon to erupt there anybody?
To find the number for figuring out how much to adjust the satellite data for ocean floor dropping do the use the increase in altitude of the land? Or do they just reach behind them to pull a number out for adjustment?
Besides an adjustment for ground water extraction; shouldn’t they also have a number for sediment run off since this would also increase the volume in the oceans? Wouldn’t the lose of mass on the land slow the up welling of the land? It might be a micron or so every hundred years.
My above comment does not show my name.
Ed Patterson
Mesa, AZ
Time for this one again:
http://oi65.tinypic.com/29549l0.jpg
The rate of sea level rise has not been increasing over the 22 years since the satellites have been employed.
And this one:
http://oi59.tinypic.com/24e8482.jpg
The satellite data has been rewritten over the last decade or so resulting in an increase of nearly one millimeter per year in the the rate of sea level rise.
Steve even these graphs convey a deception since the vertical axis in the one on the top is expressing a difference of .5 mm with a visual representation that is at least 60 mm tall.
The two graphs show different aspects of the satellite data.
The top one shows that the rate of sea level rise has not been increasing during the satellite era.
The second graph shows that the data has been changed over the last ten years.
Is there any official explanation for the change in the data. Also, I suggest that notwithstanding any other claims, this suggests the proper error margins for the data is at least +/- 1mm.
“The rate of sea level rise has not been increasing over the 22 years since the satellites have been employed.”
The first plot does not shows 22 years of sea level rise, it starts in 2004. (see x-axis labels) Wrong one? Or did I missed something?
2PetitsVerres wrote, “The first plot does not shows 22 years of sea level rise, it starts in 2004. (see x-axis labels) Wrong one? Or did I missed something?”
If I understand it correctly, Steve graphed 12(?)-year-span differences in sea-level, or something like that (and scaled the left axis to express the change in mm/year).
The data starts in December 1992. So the leftmost end of the Steve’s graph shows the sea-level difference between late 2004 and late 1992, then it shows 2005-1993, then 2006-1994, etc. Or something like that.
Is that about right, Steve?
In case you want to play with it, I’ve loaded the data from http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2016_rel1/sl_ns_global.txt into an Excel spreadsheet, and put it here:
http://www.sealevel.info/colorado_2016_rel1_sl_ns_global.xls
I took a quick stab at doing something like what Steve did, but the graph came out different. Then I noticed that the data file has quite a few missing data points, so the graph I made was probably meaningless, because the intervals between rows in the spreadsheet correspond to varying date intervals. Oops!
I didn’t bother to try to fix it, but I left the graph in the spreadsheet anyhow, in case you want to fix it. You could manually insert the missing rows with interpolated values, but there are a lot of them, so it would be tedious.
I think the right fix is probably to preprocess the data, to interpolate for the missing values. Is that what you did, Steve?
I went to their site, and I said I hoped the omission wasn’t deliberate … we’ll see how that plays out.
w.
In climatology so many of the graphs are made to present a striking slope why should we be surprised that NASA decides to “stack” adjustments in order to make it “worse than we thought”. Where I live if you get caught cross stacking the cord wood nobody will buy from you anymore and you might get punched in the nose!
The Warmistas don’t like the satellites when they show a pause in temperature but they love them when they present an enlarged sea-level rise. Sea level is not rising in Southern Australia. I wonder where that big mountain of sea water is piling up.
Colorado?
Thanks to Dave Burton for weighing in on this. He has a wealth of information at his website linked in the post. You can access data for any tidal gauges of interest to you.
?w=1000
http://www.sealevel.info
BTW, there’s an updated version of the adjustment graph upthread:
The one you’ve chosen to post does seem to do a better job of illustrating the point that increases in the rate of sea level rise over the last ten years is a function of data management and not an actual increase.
People can be ignorant, or stupid, or blinded by ideology but, worst of all, they can be intentionally deceitful.
Cool-looking Scary Graph Maker…or Scary-looking Cool Graph Machine, must be something you can find at Toys-R-Us by now. The puerile one-ups-manship has really devolved to third grade science fair levels.
I love how NASA always talks about warming seas expanding but never about warming seas outgassing CO2. It conflicts with the Ocean “Acidification” fabrication.
Without defining EXACTLY how you measured/calculated/fudged any measurement of sea level, it is pointless debating it as there are so many variables.
The essence of pseudo-scientific alarmism seems to center on picking an unmeasurable threat, then producing unverifiable measurements to support your unprovable assertions of impending doom some unknown time in the future. The general public forgets the the human species weren’t born with thermometers shoved up their butts or the innate ability to accurately gauge mean sea level by eyeball and the atmospheric fraction of carbon dioxide by sniffing the wind. They’re collectively trapped in a fantasy world where all of these measurements have existed for millions of years and concerned historians have been dutifully taking notes the entire time.
It’s very tempting to just find an island somewhere and hope they leave you alone on their road to perdition.
” it’s very tempting to just find an island somewhere and hope they leave you alone on their road to perdition.”
You are not safe on some small islands from the wackos. The flora and fauna folks have been fighting each other for years on San Clemente island. http://articles.latimes.com/1990-05-03/news/mn-439_1_san-clemente-island
Thanks for the YouTube link, John in Oz. It’s excellent, very educational!
Tricky all right. AVISO is closest to reality which I take to be 2.46 millimeters/year. I get that from Chao, Yu and Li (Science. April 11th, 2008). They first corrected all available sea level data for water held in storage by all reservoirs built since 1900. It made the sea level curve for the previous 80 years linear, with a slope of 2.46 millimeters/year. This works out to just under 10 inches per century. Anything that has been linear this long is not about to change anytime soon. It would not surprise me if the actual sea level rise comes in within an inch or so of their predicted value.