New assessments of global sea level rise from tide gauges

Estimates of global sea-level change rates based on observations from Tide Gauges (TGs) show a long-term global mean sea-level rise (GMSLR) of 1÷2 mm/yr for the 20th century. The considerable scatter in these estimates is mainly attributable to the uneven distribution of the TG sites and to several physical phenomena that cause local sea level to deviate from the global mean, or to affect the TG record through land subsidence or uplift. The main cause of vertical ground motion on a regional space scale is the response of the Earth to past ice loads, called Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA), which is often modelled and corrected for. In this work, a simple average approach was used to revisit two past estimates based on small sets of long, high-quality TG records in view of the longer record available, employing a newer GIA model (ICE-6G) from Peltier et al. [2015]. The value of GMSLR obtained from both sets is (1.5±0.4) mm/yr. In addition, a much larger set of TGs was used to estimate the contemporary (post 1993) GMSLR using satellite estimates from Cazenave et al. [2018] as a benchmark, in an attempt to understand how a simple average approach could perform for larger sets. The resulting estimate of (3.4÷3.5)±0.2 mm/yr (depending on the GIA correction applied) is comparable to the satellite result of (3.1±0.3) mm/yr.