Global Sea Level Reconstructions

Tide gauge records are the primary data set used to determine the historical (100-200 year) sea level changes. They provide excellent measurements of relative sea level changes (related to the Earth's crust) at a particular location. However, there are two main limitations for tide gauge records:

being attached to the land, which can move vertically
being poorly distributed around the world, located at continental coastlines and on islands

Carefully selected away from tectonically active areas and corrected for postglacial rebound (the vertical motion of the Earth's crust since the last deglaciation), a limited number (up to 24) of long term records have been used to estimate the linear trends in global sea level. Use of the limited number of historical records mostly located in Northern Hemisphere could lead to a possible larger error source for global sea level changes estimates due to poor spatial sampling of the tide gauges. If we are aiming to understand the non uniformed changes in global or regional sea level for the past 200 years, or to understand the role of inter-annual, decadal, or multi-decadal variability then there is a challenge to use a substantial amount of data collected by different countries that is available from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.

There are several reconstructions available here:

Global Sea Level Reconstruction by Church and White, GRL 2006, with an update in 2011.
Global Sea Level Reconstruction 1807-2002 by Jevrejeva et al., JGR 2006.
Global Sea Level Reconstruction 1700-2002 by Jevrejeva et al., GRL 2008.
1900-2009 Global Sea Level Reconstruction from Ray and Douglas, Prog. Oceanogr. 2011.
Global Sea Level Reconstruction 1807-2010 by Jevrejeva et al., GPC 2014.

Products

Global Sea Level Reconstructions