More confounders at global and decadal scales in detecting recent sea level accelerations

Abstract

AbstractThe residuals of 27 globally distributed long tide gauge recordswere scrutinized after removing the globally compounding effect of the periodic lunar node tides and almost periodic solar radiation’s sub and superharmonics from the tide gauge data. The spectral analysis of the residuals revealed additional unmodeled periodicities at decadal scales, 19 of which are within the close range of 12–14 years, at 27 tide gauge stations. The amplitudes of the periodicitieswere subsequently estimated for the spectrally detected periods and they were found to be statistically significant (p «0.05) for 18 out of 27 globally distributed tide gauge stations. It was shown that the estimated amplitudes at different localities may have biased the outcome of all the previous studies based on tide gauge or satellite altimetry data that did not account for these periodicities, within the range −0.5 – 0.5 mm/yr., acting as another confounder in detecting 21st century sea level rise.