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.
View Full-Text
▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
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.
Show more citation formats
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.