Human-caused sea level rise drives 21st-century worldwide water level extremes

2026/06/10 by Daniel M. Gilford, Yucheng Lin, Kristina Dahl +3 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Flood Risk Assessment and Management #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research

paper · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adz3595

openalex publication_date 2026/06/10 · openalex created_date 2026/06/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Abstract

The rate and impacts of sea level rise vary considerably around the world, but the contribution of human-caused climate change to increases in local and regional flood risks has not yet been systematically explored. Because such information is critical to local decision making, legal proceedings, and loss and damage determinations, we quantify human-caused climate change's contributions to sea level rise at worldwide locations using budget-based and semiempirical model methods. Results show that human-caused sea level rise is quantifiable at 97% of 519 tide gauge sites and is responsible for 58% (44 to 65%) of the observed daily extreme water level exceedances over 2000-2018. On average, human-caused sea level rise has caused a near-tripling in the number of days with attributable exceedances since the 1970s.

Citations

• A framework for estimating the anthropogenic part of Antarctica’s sea level contribution in a synthetic setting
• PaleoSTeHM v1.0: a modern, scalable spatiotemporal hierarchical modeling framework for paleo-environmental data
• The causes of sea-level rise since 1900
• The Paris Climate Agreement and future sea-level rise from Antarctica

Discussions

• One paper, led by @climatecentral.org's Dan GIlford (I was a co-author), used two different methods (one based on a budget analysis, one based on a statistical model) to bound the human contribution t [bsky, 8 points, 2 comments]

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