Are the models wrongly expecting sea level rise to closely mirror the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 content, in all regions? It seems it doesn’t work like that. The study itself says: ‘As for simulation of the interannual variance, good agreement can be seen across different models, yet the models present a relatively low agreement with observations. The simulations show much weaker variance than observed’.
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According to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global mean sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in the last 3000 years, says Eurekalert.
This makes hundreds of coastal cities and millions of people vulnerable to a threat of higher water levels.
State-of-the-art climate models provide a crucial means to study how much and how soon sea levels will rise.
However, to what extent these models are able to represent sea level variations remains an open issue.
Thus, they should be evaluated before they can be adopted to forecast future sea-level changes.
In a paper recently published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, Dr Zhuoqi He from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology led a team to assess the performance of climate models in simulating the sea level over the low-to-mid latitudes of the globe.
The results indicated that the models simulated the long-term mean sea level relatively well. However, strong biases were apparent when the models tried to reproduce the sea level variance.
For example, almost all of them underestimated the interannual signals over the subtropics where strong western boundary currents prevail.
Full article here.
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Study — Performance of CMIP6 models in simulating the dynamic sea level: Mean and interannual variance
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
November 21, 2022 at 05:25AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 