Abstract
Abstract. An important contribution to future changes in regional sea level extremes is due to the changes in intrinsic ocean variability, in particular ocean eddies. Here, we study a scenario of future dynamic sea level (DSL) extremes using a high-resolution version of the Parallel Ocean Program and generalized extreme value theory. This model is forced with atmospheric fluxes from a coupled climate model which has been integrated under the IPCC-SRES-A1B scenario over the period 2000–2100. Changes in 10-year return time DSL extremes are very inhomogeneous over the globe and are related to changes in ocean currents and corresponding regional shifts in ocean eddy pathways. In this scenario, several regions in the North Atlantic experience an increase in mean DSL of up to 0.4 m over the period 2000–2100. DSL extremes with a 10-year return time increase up to 0.2 m with largest values in the northern and eastern Atlantic.
Highlights
From satellite measurements, it has been well established that global mean sea level has increased by about 3 mm yr−1 over the period 1993–2010 (Rhein et al, 2013; Church and White, 2011; Church et al, 2013; Watson et al, 2015)
We considered future dynamic sea level (DSL) changes using a strongly eddying ocean model forced by atmospheric fields according to an SRES A1B scenario
The results show that changes in local and regional probability density function (PDF) are mainly due to changes in DSL variability on short timescales and related to changes in the ocean eddy field
Summary
It has been well established that global mean sea level has increased by about 3 mm yr−1 over the period 1993–2010 (Rhein et al, 2013; Church and White, 2011; Church et al, 2013; Watson et al, 2015). Several regions were identified where the forced sea level change signal is relatively strong with respect to the internal variability, e.g., the Indo-Pacific part of the Southern Ocean and the eastern equatorial Pacific, and may be detected earlier (Bordbar et al, 2015). In all these model studies the strongest component of oceanic internal variability, i.e., that due to ocean meso-scale eddies, was not represented. We focus on the changes in the probability density function of regional (and more local) DSL values and 10-year return extreme values over the period 2000– 2100, computed using the generalized extreme value theory (Coles, 2001), and compare these results to those obtained from a forced non-eddying version of POP
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