The Balancing of the Sea-Level Budget

Abstract

The last 5 years have seen continued progress in closing the sea-level budget, the accounting for the contributions of sea-level change, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Balancing the sea-level budget is critical to understanding recent and future climate change as well as balancing the Earth’s energy budget and water budget. During the last decade, advancements in the ocean observing system—satellite altimeters, hydrographic profiling floats, and space-based gravity missions—have allowed the sea-level budget to be assessed with unprecedented accuracy from direct, rather than inferred, estimates. In particular, several recent studies have used the sea-level budget to bound the rate of deep-ocean warming. Despite the fact that much of the observing system in place before the satellite era was not intended for global climate monitoring, new analyses of the historical record suggest that the twentieth century sea-level budget may be understood.