DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6382554
title: IPCC AR6 Sea Level Projections

description: Description

This data set contains the sea-level projections associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report. It contains the full set of samples for the global projections (under ar6.zip), as well as summary relative sea level projections (under ar6-regional-confidence.zip and, without the AR6 estimate of background sea level process rates, ar6-regional_novlm-confidence.zip). Most users will want to focus on the confidence_output_files, which correspond most directly to the figures and tables in the report. For the global projections, samples from the individual probability distributions described in AR6 WG1 9.6.3 are in the full_sample* directories.

Regional projections can also be accessed through the NASA/IPCC Sea Level Projections Tool at https://sealevel.nasa.gov/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projection-tool.

See https://zenodo.org/communities/ipcc-ar6-sea-level-projections for additional related data sets.

See https://github.com/Rutgers-ESSP/IPCC-AR6-Sea-Level-Projections for a guide to available resources.

Required Acknowledgements and Citation 

In order to document the impact of these sea-level rise projections, users of the projections are obligated to cite chapter 9 of Working Group 1 contribution to the the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, the Framework for Assessment of Changes To Sea-level (FACTS) model description paper, and the version of the data set used:



Fox-Kemper, B., H.T. Hewitt, C. Xiao, G. Aðalgeirsdóttir, S.S. Drijfhout, T.L. Edwards, N.R. Golledge, M. Hemer, R.E. Kopp, G. Krinner, A. Mix, D. Notz, S. Nowicki, I.S. Nurhati, L. Ruiz, J.-B. Sallée, A.B.A. Slangen, and Y. Yu, 2021: Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1211–1362, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.011.

Kopp, R. E., Garner, G. G., Hermans, T. H. J., Jha, S., Kumar, P., Reedy, A., Slangen, A. B. A., Turilli, M., Edwards, T. L., Gregory, J. M., Koubbe, G., Levermann, A., Merzky, A., Nowicki, S., Palmer, M. D., & Smith, C. (2023). The Framework for Assessing Changes To Sea-Level (FACTS) v1.0: A platform for characterizing parametric and structural uncertainty in future global, relative, and extreme sea-level change. Geoscientific Model Development, 16, 7461–7489. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-7461-2023

Garner, G. G., T. Hermans, R. E. Kopp, A. B. A. Slangen, T. L. Edwards, A. Levermann, S. Nowikci, M. D. Palmer, C. Smith, B. Fox-Kemper, H. T. Hewitt, C. Xiao, G. Aðalgeirsdóttir, S. S. Drijfhout, T. L. Edwards, N. R. Golledge, M. Hemer, G. Krinner, A. Mix, D. Notz, S. Nowicki, I. S. Nurhati, L. Ruiz, J-B. Sallée, Y. Yu, L. Hua, T. Palmer, B. Pearson, 2021. IPCC AR6 Sea Level Projections. Version 20210809. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5914709.


Please also include in the acknowledgements of works citing these projections:



We thank the projection authors for developing and making the sea-level rise projections available, multiple funding agencies for supporting the development of the projections, and the NASA Sea Level Change Team for developing and hosting the IPCC AR6 Sea Level Projection Tool.


IPCC AR6 Licensing

The IPCC AR6 Sea-Level Rise Projections are licensed by the authors under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/). The data producers and data providers make no warranty, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. All liabilities arising from the supply of the information (including any liability arising in negligence) are excluded to the fullest extent permitted by law.
description: The development of the sea-level rise projections was supported by multiple funders, including the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grants 80NSSC17K0698, 80NSSC20K1724 and 80NSSC21K0322 and JPL task 105393.509496.02.08.13.31), the U.S. National Science Foundation (grant ICER-1663807), the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/T009381/1), NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, PROTECT (which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 869304), and UK Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/T007443/1.

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF.