Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

Large scale sea level changes

Sea level integrates many different processes in the climate system. It is an interplay of processes in the ocean, on land, in the atmosphere and in the solid earth. We combine models and observations of each of these processes to get a better understanding of the causes of sea-level change around the world. As sea-level change is not a globally uniform process, we focus on regionally varying changes in addition to global mean changes.   

20th century sea-level change  
By comparing observational data to model simulations, we want to:
a) improve the 20th century sea level record
b) close the 20th sea level budget  
c) better understand the drivers of sea-level change.   

Sea-level projections  
We use climate models in combination with models of the land ice, land water and vertical land movement contributions to project the long term changes in regional sea level as a result of climate change all around the world.

Coastal interactions  
The consequences of sea-level change are felt most at the coast, where the ocean interacts with nature and society. We want to improve the projections of sea-level  change at the coast, by increasing the spatial and temporal resolutions.  
Furthermore, we want to better understand what the consequences of sea-level rise are for different physical, ecological and sociological processes at the coast.    

High resolution sea-level projections  
Climate models provide sea-level projections on relatively coarse resolutions (typically 100x100km). In this project, we will therefore use finer scale models to investigate sea-level change in the European shelf seas.

Sea-level change and coastal ecology  
Sea-level change and associated changes in tidal amplitude and sea-level extremes can have a large impact on coastal ecological systems, such as salt marshes or seagrass meadows. We study different systems and focus on understanding how they respond to and interact with, sea-level change in a changing climate.