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Church and White Global Mean Sea Level Reconstruction
Note: The definitive link to this reconstruction is now on the CSIRO Sea Level Data page. See below.This page provides a short description and data file of the Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) reconstruction for the period 1870-2001 by John Church and Neil White (CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research). All questions about the data themselves should be addressed to Dr. Neil White.
The reconstruction has used monthly-mean tide gauge data from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) database [Woodworth and Player, 2003], together with Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOFs) from a 12-year TOPEX/Poseidon + Jason-1 satellite altimeter data set to 'reconstruct' a GMSL curve from January 1870 to December 2001.
No inverted barometer correction was applied. Tide gauge data was corrected for Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA).
More information about data and methods for the calculations can be found in:
Church, J. A., and N. J. White (2006), "A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise", Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
The data file can be downloaded by Clicking here.
Description of the file:
The file has three columns:
- Column 1: time in years (1870.0417 = Jan 1870 1870.1250 = Feb 1870 etc)
- Column 2: GMSL in millimetres (the mean has been removed from this series)
- Column 3: One-sigma error in millimetres. This corresponds to the half-width of the darker-grey band on the bottom trace of figure 2(a) of the above paper. That is, the distance from the black GMSL line to the edge of the darker-grey error band.
Reconstruction Extended to 2009
The reconstruction of Church and White (2006) has been updated in a recent paper accepted for publication in 2011 (reference below). This updated reconstruction and other associated sea level products from CSIRO can be found at their Sea Level Data page.Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2011), "Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st Century", Surveys in Geophysics, 32(4-5), 585-602, doi:10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1.
