Minimum 60 years of recording are needed to compute the sea level rate of rise in the Western South Pacific

Abstract

Sea levels generally oscillate with multi-decadal periodicities worldwide with up to the quasi-60 years detected in many tide gauges. Nevertheless, the most part of the literature on sea levels computes apparent rates of rise of sea levels much larger than the legitimate by using short time windows in selected locations only covering part of a valley-to-peak of this multi-decadal oscillation. It is shown in this paper that along the Pacific coast of Australia the sea levels oscillate with a frequency close to the Southern Ocean Index (SOI) oscillation of 19 years and a lower frequency of about 60 years. The rates of rise of sea levels computed by linear fitting of the data recorded since the early 1990s in selected locations of the Australian Pacific coastline and in the tropical Pacific islands are from a valley of the peak and valley oscillations and are much higher than the legitimate long term values.

Keywords

• sea level acceleration
• ocean thermal expansio
• subsidy
• pacific atoll dynamic