Recent progress on sea-level rise over the marginal seas in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper reports the recent progress of sea-level rise (SLR) over the critical region of Southeast Asia (SEA) that is vulnerable to climate change. While many papers report the SLR on local scales (e.g., Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.), studies on understanding the SEA regional impact of SLR have yet to be reported, which has become the motivation of this paper. A literature review has been adopted to formulate the recent progress of SLR in the studied region. Besides global factors, we identified five (5) local factor drivers contributing to the SLR over SEA: 1) El-Nino and La-Nina, 2) seasonal monsoon, 3) wind-driven circulation variability/North Pacific Decadal Oscillation, 4) Indian Ocean dipole, 5) tectonic uplift and subsidence due to earthquake. The satellite altimeters and tide gauges have become major techniques for estimating SLR in the region due to the long-term data availability, except in regions with active seismic (e.g., Indonesia), tide gauge data gaps are crucial. Based on the Jason series altimeters (2002-2018), the SEA relative SLR is reported to be accelerating (2-6 mm/yr), which is critically beyond the global mean SLR (3.6 mm/yr between 2006 to 2015). Celebes Sea (6.05 ± 0.78 mm/yr), Sulu Sea (5.64 ± 0.64 mm/yr) and South China Sea (3.88 ± 0.49 mm/yr) record high SLR exceeding the global value, while Malacca Strait (2.67 ± 0.81 mm/yr) records slightly lower. Several cities (e.g., Surabaya, Jakarta, Benoa, Semarang Indonesia, and Ko Sichang and Ko Mattaphon Thailand) record extremely high SLR beyond 5 mm/yr.