Natural Variability and Vertical Land Motion Contributions in the Mediterranean Sea-Level Records over the Last Two Centuries and Projections for 2100
1
Radboud Radio Lab, Department of Astrophysics/IMAPP-Radboud University, P.O. Box 9010, 6500GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2
LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France
3
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, 00143 Rome, Italy
4
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, 40100 Bologna, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Water 2019, 11(7), 1480; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11071480
Received: 14 June 2019 / Revised: 2 July 2019 / Accepted: 5 July 2019 / Published: 16 July 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Relative Sea-Level Changes and their Impact on Coastal Zones)
We analyzed a set of geodetic data to investigate the contribution of local factors, namely the sea level natural variability (SLNV) and the vertical land motion (VLM), to the sea-level trend. The SLNV is analyzed through the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) on tidal data (>60 years of recordings) and results are used to evaluate its effects on sea levels. The VLM is measured at a set of continuous GPS (cGPS) stations (>5 years of recordings), located nearby the tide gauges. By combining VLM and SLNV with IPCC-AR5 regional projections of climatic data (Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 2.6 and 8.5), we provide relative sea-level rise projections by 2100. Results show that the combined effects of SLNV and VLM are not negligible, contributing between 15% and 65% to the sea-level variability. Expected sea levels for 2100 in the RCP8.5 scenario are between 475 ± 203 (Bakar) and 818 ± 250 mm (Venice). In the Venice Lagoon, the mean land subsidence at 3.3 ± 0.85 mm a−1 (locally up to 8.45 ± 1.69 mm a−1) is driving the local sea-level rise acceleration.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Vecchio, A.; Anzidei, M.; Serpelloni, E.; Florindo, F. Natural Variability and Vertical Land Motion Contributions in the Mediterranean Sea-Level Records over the Last Two Centuries and Projections for 2100. Water 2019, 11, 1480.
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