Publication Date:
2018-01-25
Description:
As global average sea-level rises in the early part of this century there is great interest in how much global and local sea level will change in the forthcoming decades. The Paris Climate Agreement's proposed temperature thresholds of 1.5 °C and 2 °C have directed the research community to ask what differences occur in the climate system for these two states. We have developed a novel approach to combine climate model outputs that follow specific temperature pathways to make probabilistic projections of sea-level in a 1.5 °C and 2 °C world. We find median global sea-level projections for 1.5 °C and 2 °C temperature pathways of 44 cm and 50 cm respectively. The 90% uncertainty ranges (5-95%) are both around 48 cm by 2100. In addition, we take an alternative approach to estimate the contribution from ice sheets by using a semi-empirical global sea-level model. Here we find median projections of 58 cm and 68 cm for 1.5 °C and 2 °C temperature pathways. The 90% uncertainty ranges are 67 cm and 82 cm respectively. Regional projections show similar patterns for both temperature pathways, though differences vary between the median projections (2-10 cm) and 95 th percentile (5-20 cm) for the bulk of oceans using process-based approach and 10-15 cm (median) and 15-25 cm (95th percentile) using the semi-empirical approach.
Electronic ISSN:
2328-4277
Topics:
Geosciences
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