Abstract
Sea-level rise poses severe threats to coastal and low-lying regions around the world, by exacerbating coastal erosion and flooding. Adequate sea-level projections over the next decades are important for both decision making and for the development of successful adaptation strategies in these coastal and low-lying regions to climate change. Ocean components of climate models used in the most recent sea-level projections do not explicitly resolve ocean mesoscale processes. Only a few effects of these mesoscale processes are represented in these models, which leads to errors in the simulated properties of the ocean circulation that affect sea-level projections. Using the Caribbean Sea as an example region, we demonstrate a strong dependence of future sea-level change on ocean model resolution in simulations with a global climate model. The results indicate that, at least for the Caribbean Sea, adequate regional projections of sea-level change can only be obtained with ocean models which capture mesoscale processes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 14599 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 3 Sept 2020 |
Funding
This work is part of the research program ALW-Caribbean with project 858.14.061 (SCENES), which is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The authors thank Michael Kliphuis (IMAU, UU) for his assistance with the CESM simulations. All computations were performed on the Cartesius at SURF-sara in Amsterdam within project 15552. The data from the model simulation used in this work are available upon reasonable request from the authors. The CMIP6 model output is provided by the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling. The altimeter products were produced and distributed by AVISO (https://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/data.html).
