Apparent hot and cold spots of acceleration along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States

Abstract

While sea levels are known to oscillate with multi-decadal periodicities worldwide up to quasi-60 years, 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 covering only part of a valleyto- peak quasi-60 year multi-decadal oscillation. It is shown that along the North Atlantic coast of the United States the sea levels oscillate closely to the AMO index, and the rate of rise of sea levels computed by linear fitting of the last 30-36 years of data is much higher than the true value. It is also shown that similar minimum requirement of 60 years of recording is needed along the North Pacific coast of the US, where the longer periodicity of the oscillations is not clearly defined; possibly for the strong ENSO signal covering a quasi-60 years oscillation.

Keywords

• sea level acceleration
• sea level rate of rise
• global warming
• statistical analysis
• climate parameters time series