Abstract
Change in Land Water Storage (LWS) is one of the main components driving sea-level rise over the twenty-first century. LWS alteration results from both human activities and climate change. Up to now, all components to sea-level change are usually quantified upon a certain climate change scenario except land water changes. Here, we propose to improve this by analyzing the contribution of LWS to regional sea-level change by considering five Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate models forced by three different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) greenhouse gas emission scenarios. For this analysis, we used LWS output of the global hydrological and water resources model, PCR-GLOBWB 2, in order to project regional sea-level patterns. Projections of ensemble means indicate a range of LWS-driven sea-level rise with larger differences in projections among climate models than between scenarios. Our results suggest that LWS change will contribute around 10% to the projected global mean sea-level rise by the end of twenty-first century. Contribution of LWS to regional sea-level rise is projected to be considerably larger than the global mean over several regions, up to 60% higher than global average of LWS-driven sea-level rise, including the Pacific islands, the south coast of Africa and the west coast of Australia.
Highlights
Global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is governed by thermal expansion of oceans, and contributions from ice sheets, glaciers and land water storage (LWS) change, where land water changes are considered to be the collective sum of changes of water in the soil, wetland, groundwater, lakes and other reservoirs
Their results indicated that global sea-level rise will be around 73 mm. It suggested a relatively high contribution of Land Water Storage (LWS) to sea-level rise. This should be viewed as a high estimate of LWS-driven sea-level rise, since natural LWS change was not included in this study and future projections of LWS were basically the extrapolation of water impoundment reserved by the dams and does not provide regional patterns of sea level
We quantified the contribution of LWS change to regional sea-level rise by considering five different climate models forced by three different climate scenarios over the twenty-first century
Summary
Global mean sea level (GMSL) rise is governed by thermal expansion of oceans, and contributions from ice sheets, glaciers and land water storage (LWS) change, where land water changes are considered to be the collective sum of changes of water in the soil, wetland, groundwater, lakes and other reservoirs. A major impact has been the construction of dams increasing the global storage of water on the continents This effect reduced the global sea-level rise (Peltier, 2001; Milly et al, 2003; Konikow, 2011; Dieng et al, 2015; Reager et al, 2016) by about 30 mm sea level equivalent since 1950s (Chao et al, 2008). Additional direct human impacts such as deforestation and the drainage of wetlands modify LWS (Milly et al, 2010; Van Beek et al, 2011; Pokhrel et al, 2012; Wada et al, 2012)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
