ALBERT

Description: The enhancement of the stratospheric aerosol layer by volcanic eruptions induces a complex set of responses causing global and regional climate effects on a broad range of timescales. Uncertainties exist regarding the climatic response to strong volcanic forcing identified in coupled climate simulations that contributed to the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). In order to better understand the sources of these model diversities, the Model Intercomparison Project on the climatic response to Volcanic forcing (VolMIP) has defined a coordinated set of idealized volcanic perturbation experiments to be carried out in alignment with the CMIP6 protocol. VolMIP provides a common stratospheric aerosol data set for each experiment to minimize differences in the applied volcanic forcing. It defines a set of initial conditions to assess how internal climate variability contributes to determining the response. VolMIP will assess to what extent volcanically forced responses of the coupled ocean–atmosphere system are robustly simulated by state-of-the-art coupled climate models and identify the causes that limit robust simulated behavior, especially differences in the treatment of physical processes. This paper illustrates the design of the idealized volcanic perturbation experiments in the VolMIP protocol and describes the common aerosol forcing input data sets to be used.

Description: The city of Venice and the surrounding lagoonal ecosystem are highly vulnerable to variations in relative sea level. In the past ∼150 years, this was characterized by an average rate of relative sea-level rise of about 2.5 mm/year resulting from the combined contributions of vertical land movement and sea-level rise. This literature review reassesses and synthesizes the progress achieved in quantification, understanding and prediction of the individual contributions to local relative sea level, with a focus on the most recent studies. Subsidence contributed to about half of the historical relative sea-level rise in Venice. The current best estimate of the average rate of sea-level rise during the observational period from 1872 to 2019 based on tide-gauge data after removal of subsidence effects is 1.23 ± 0.13 mm/year. A higher – but more uncertain – rate of sea-level rise is observed for more recent years. Between 1993 and 2019, an average change of about +2.76 ± 1.75 mm/year is estimated from tide-gauge data after removal of subsidence. Unfortunately, satellite altimetry does not provide reliable sea-level data within the Venice Lagoon. Local sea-level changes in Venice closely depend on sea-level variations in the Adriatic Sea, which in turn are linked to sea-level variations in the Mediterranean Sea. Water mass exchange through the Strait of Gibraltar and its drivers currently constitute a source of substantial uncertainty for estimating future deviations of the Mediterranean mean sea-level trend from the global-mean value. Regional atmospheric and oceanic processes will likely contribute significant interannual and interdecadal future variability in Venetian sea level with a magnitude comparable to that observed in the past. On the basis of regional projections of sea-level rise and an understanding of the local and regional processes affecting relative sea-level trends in Venice, the likely range of atmospherically corrected relative sea-level rise in Venice by 2100 ranges between 32 and 62 cm for the RCP2.6 scenario and between 58 and 110 cm for the RCP8.5 scenario, respectively. A plausible but unlikely high-end scenario linked to strong ice-sheet melting yields about 180 cm of relative sea-level rise in Venice by 2100. Projections of human-induced vertical land motions are currently not available, but historical evidence demonstrates that they have the potential to produce a significant contribution to the relative sea-level rise in Venice, exacerbating the hazard posed by climatically induced sea-level changes.

Description: Using a very high resolution 3D numerical model we investigate the tidal dynamics in the Strait of Messina. We show that different stratifications at the southern boundaries, consistent with observed stratifications in the Ionian approaches to the Strait, yield different mean sea level heights. On this basis we search for long-term variations in sea level heights measured in the tidal stations of Catania, Messina and Marseille, and associate them with the concomitant phase of dominant modes of interannual-to-decadal climate variability in the Euro-Mediterranean sector. We focus on the atmospheric North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and on the Adriatic-Ionian Bimodal Oscillating System (BiOS) to illustrate the grand variability in sea level teleconnections during the last four decades. In particular, observations reveal a strong imprint of both NAO and BiOS on all sea level records in the 21st century, when NAO and BiOS are inversely correlated. In the 1990s, a well known period of persistent positive NAO anomalies, the NAO imprint on sea level becomes weaker compared to the most recent period, although it remains clear on decadal trends, while the BiOS shows very weak positive variability. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when the NAO was on a neutral phase with weak variability, the NAO imprint on sea levels is weakest, and sea levels in Marseille and Sicily anticorrelate with each other, in contrast to the positive correlations found during the later periods. Based on these observational evidence, we discuss how our modeling results provide a basis to understand the local dynamics that contributed to determine such observed decadal variability.