Last Updated:
February 28, 2007

GCRIO Program Overview

Library 
Our extensive collection of documents.

Privacy Policy

Archives of the
Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 2, NUMBER 9, SEPTEMBER 1989

PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS...
SEA LEVEL

Item #d89sep63

"Eustatic Sea Level and Carbon Dioxide," A. Frei (Dept. Appl. Sci., New York Univ., New York NY 10003), M.C. MacCracken, M.I. Hoffert, Northeast Environ. Sci., 7(1), 91-96, 1988.

A review with 18 references on techniques used to model eustatic sea level fluctuations. A sea level rise in response to air pollution is likely, but the magnitudes of estimates are uncertain: 8-20 cm for a scenario of low anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission and 25-60 cm for a scenario of high greenhouse gas emission.

Item #d89sep64

"Global Sea Level Rise and the Greenhouse Effect: Might They be Connected?" W.R. Peltier (Dept. Phys., Univ. Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A7, Can.), A.M. Tushingham, Science, 244(4906), 806-810, May 19, 1989.

Secular sea level trends extracted from tide gauge records of appropriately long duration demonstrate that global sea level may be rising at a rate in excess of one millimeter per year. When the tide gauge data are filtered, removing the contribution of ongoing glacial isostatic adjustments to the local sea level trend at each location, then the individual tide gauge records reveal sharply reduced geographic scatter and suggest that there is a globally coherent signal of strength 2.4 + or - 0.90 millimeters per year that is active in the system. This signal could constitute an indication of global warming.

Item #d89sep65

"Steric Sea Level Trends in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Possible Evidence of Global Sea Level Rise," R.E. Thomson (Inst. Ocean Sci., POB 6000, 9860 W. Saanich Rd., Sidney, B.C. V8L 4B2, Can.), S. Tabata, J. Clim., 2(6), 542 ff., 1989.

Thirty-year time series of hydrographic observations from Ocean Station PAPA and Line `P' are used to estimate secular trends in monthly mean steric sea level heights relative to depths of 100 and 1000 decibars in the northeast Pacific Ocean. Statistical analysis showed that steric sea levels in the northeast Pacific are rising at approximately 1 mm yr-1 and that this increase may be associated with a combined regional warming of the deeper waters and dilution of the surface waters. Although the observed trends appear to be linked to climate-induced eustatic changes in global sea level, the records are not of adequate length or spatial coverage to rule out effects of shifting regional circulation patterns.