Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Climate change impacts on environmental systems
Figure 4.7
Observed change in global mean sea level
Sea level (mm)
80
40
0
– 40
– 80
– 120
– 160
– 200
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
2020
Global mean sea level (reconstruction)
Global mean sea level (satellite altimeter)
Global mean sea level (uncertainty range)
Note:
Source:
The figure depicts the rise in global mean sea level from 1880 to 2015, relative to the 1990 level, based on two sources. The green line
shows a reconstruction for 1880 to 2013 from coastal and island tide gauge data. The uncertainty interval is shown in grey. The dark blue
line shows a time series for 1993 to 2015 based on altimeter data from the TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites. Corrections
for the inverse barometer effect and glacial isostatic adjustment have been applied.
Adapted from Church and White, 2011; Masters et al., 2012. Data supplied by Benoit Legresy (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation (CSIRO)).
from melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets
has increased since the early 1990s. Changes in land
water storage have made only a small contribution,
but the rate of groundwater extraction has increased
recently and now exceeds the rate of storage in
reservoirs (Church et al., 2011, 2013; Clark et al.,
2015). A recent study concludes that climate-driven
variability in precipitation has resulted in increased
water storage on land, and that global sea level rise
in the period 2002–2014 would have been 15–20 %
higher in the absence of this climate variability (Reager
et al., 2016).
126 Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report