GGOS Focus Area 3
Understanding and Forecasting Sea-Level Rise and Variability
Tilo Schöne1, CK. Shum2, Mark Tamisiea3, Philip Woodworth3
1Helmholtz Zentrum Potsdam, GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ, Potsdam, Germany, tschoene@gfz-potsdam.de2Division of Geodetic Science, School of Earth Sciences, Ohio, USA, ckshum@osu.edu
3National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool, UK, mtam@noc.ac.uk, plw@noc.ac.uk

The sea level and its change is measured for more than a century.
Especially, for nations with long coastlines and important coastal
industry observations of tides, extremes, and long-term changes havestrong impacts on coastal societies and coastal economics.
Today, the observed sea level rise (SLR) is largely associated withclimate related changes. To find the patterns and fingerprints of thosechanges, different monitoring techniques have been developed. Someof them are local, e.g. tide gauges, others are global, e.g., radar altimetry. In many areas, the slow long-term rise in sea level is superimposed by artificial and sometimes natural changes, which might havemuch higher rates in relative sea level rise. Reasons for that are e.g.,groundwater, gas or oil extraction in near-shore areas or changes in
the coastal habitat.
GGOS and its services contribute in many ways to the monitoring of
the sea level. This ranges from tide gauge observations, estimation ofgravity changes, GNSS control of tide gauges or the maintenance of
the International Reference Frame. Focus Area 3 (Understanding andFore-casting Sea-Level Rise and Variability) of GGOS establishes aplatform and will be a forum to researchers and authorities for
estimating and predicting global and local sea level changes in a 10- to
30-year time horizon. It presents an excellent opportunity to emphasize
the global, through to regional and local, importance of GGOS to awide range of sea-level related science and practical applications.

GGOS Focus Area 3 Sea-Level Change, Variability and Forecasting has identified
actions to be undertaken to advance geodetic techniques and technologies applied tosea level research. These are•

Identification or (re)-definition of the requirements for a proper understanding ofglobal and regional/local sea-level rise and its variability especially in so far as they
relate to geodetic monitoring provided by the GGOS infrastructure, and their current
links to external organizations (e.g., GEO, CEOS, and other observing systems).

•Identification of organizations or individuals who can take forward eachrequirement, or act as points of contact for each requirement, where they are
primarily the responsibility of bodies not related to GGOS.

•Identification of a preliminary set of practical or application (as opposed to scientific)
pilot projects, which will demonstrate the viability, and the importance of geodetic
measurements to mitigation of sea-level rise at a local or regional level. This
identification will be followed by construction of proposals for pilot projects and theirundertaking.

•In the long-term, the aim is to support forecasting of global and regional sea level
for the 21st century with an expected forecast period of 20 to 30 years or longer.

The first selected projects address major aspects of the sea level research in
Britain (“The Use of Continuous GPS and Absolute Gravimetry for Sea
Level Science in the UK“, lead R. Bingley, University of Nottingham),subsidence monitoring in Bangkok („Revisiting the Threat of Southeast
Asian Relative Sea Level Rise by Multi-Disciplinary Research“, lead: WimSimons, Delft University of Technology (DUT), Delft, Netherlands), andBangladesh (“Bangladesh Delta Relative Sea-Level Rise Hazard
Assessment (BanD-Aid)”, lead: C.K. Shum The Ohio State University, USA).
All projects have a major focus on the combination of sea level and geodetic
monitoring in an integrative approach.

r Later
One Yea tection
ProCoastal

We are continuing to encourage the development of newproposals.

http://176.28.21.212/en/focus-areas/sea-level-change-variability-and-forecasting/

http://www.ggos.org
www.ggos.org
http://In 2012 GGOS Focus Area 3 opened a Call for Participation for projects
demonstrating the value of geodetic techniques to sea level science andapplications. This CfP is still open for new responses. Special emphasis isgiven to local and regional projects which are relevant to coastal communities,
and which depend on the global perspective of GGOS. The aim of this CfP isto build a GGOS community network and to share knowledge and expertise.