Abstract
There is a growing awareness that uncertainties surrounding future sea-level projections may be much larger than typically perceived. Recently published projections appear widely divergent and highly sensitive to non-trivial model choices. Moreover, the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) may be much less stable than previous believed, enabling a rapid disintegration. Here, we present a set of probabilistic sea-level projections that approximates the deeply uncertain WAIS contributions. The projections aim to inform robust decisions by clarifying the sensitivity to non-trivial or controversial assumptions. We show that the deeply uncertain WAIS contribution can dominate other uncertainties within decades. These deep uncertainties call for the development of robust adaptive strategies. These decision-making needs, in turn, require mission-oriented basic science, for example about potential signposts and the maximum rate of WAIS-induced sea-level changes.
Highlights
Future sea-level rise poses nontrivial risks for many coastal communities[1, 2]
The construction of sea-level projections is often largely motivated by scientific considerations, such as gaining a better understanding of the underlying physics[2, 9]
We present sea-level projections to inform the design of robust strategies to cope with the deep uncertainties surrounding sea-level change, i.e. “solutions capable of withstanding from deviations of the conditions for which they are designed”[17]
Summary
We presented a set of sea-level projections designed to represent important deep uncertainties and to inform robust decision-making frameworks. Our simple model framework includes semi-empirical models of the climate and sea-level contributions from thermal expansion, the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, and glaciers and small ice caps. Its relative simplicity is chosen to result in a transparent model structure and to enable a data-model fusion. We only utilize observational data accompanied with clear uncertainty estimates, and aim for relatively non-informative prior distributions. We communicate divergent expert assessments and large structural uncertainties as deep uncertainties surrounding the projections. We present examples of low and high sea-level rise scenarios that could be expanded by relying more heavily on expert elicitation[31, 32] or by incorporating strong priors on the characterization of the West Antarctic deep uncertainties
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