Preliminary analysis of acceleration of sea level rise through the twentieth century using extended tide gauge data sets (August 2014)

This work explores the potential for extending tide gauge time series from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) using historical documents, PSMSL ancillary data, and by developing additional composite time series using near neighbor tide gauges. The aim was to increase the number, completeness, and geographical extent of records covering most or all of the twentieth century. The number of at least 75% complete century-scale time series have been approximately doubled over the original PSMSL data set. In total, over 4800 station years have been added, with 294 of these added to 10 long Southern Hemisphere records. Individual century-scale acceleration values derived from this new extended data set tend to converge on a value of 0.01 ± 0.008 mm/yr2. This result agrees closely with recent work and is statistically significant at the 1 sigma level. Possible causes of acceleration and errors are briefly discussed. Results confirm the importance of current data archeology projects involving digitization of the remaining archives of hard copy tide gauge data for sea level and climate studies.