NASA’s Sea Level Change Team led by Ben Hamlington has predicted in its report that over the next 30 years, coastal flooding will increase significantly because of the rise in the sea level. Ben Hamlington is a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Southern California. The interagency task force includes NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies. The report titled Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States was released on the 15th of February 2022 and has concluded that by 2050 the sea-level rise along the US coastlines will be anywhere between 10 to 12 inches on average above today’s levels.
The team was established in 2014 with the goal to understand the regional relative sea-level changes on a range of timelines. The recent report is an update to a report that was released in 2017 and provides near-term projections for the next 30 years. These reports are used by agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to update their plans on foreseeing and managing the effects of sea-level rise.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the report corroborates and supports the previous studies that the sea levels are rising at a rapid rate and are threatening communities across the globe. The climate crisis is ongoing and strong action is needed to overcome the risks it poses. He further said that NASA is committed to protecting the planet and is increasing its monitoring capabilities to ensure that the climate data is data accessible as well as understandable.
The task force developed their near-term sea level rise projections by outlining an improved understanding of how the processes such as melting glaciers and ice sheets, complex interactions between ocean, land, and ice play out to contribute to rising seas levels, which in turn will affect the ocean height, said Ben Hamlington, one of the lead authors of the update.
Led by Hamlington, the team has also developed an online mapping tool to picture the report’s state-of-the-art sea level rise projections on a localized level across the United States. He hopes that the online tool will help make the information widely accessible.
The Sea Level Rise Task Force has forecasted that because of higher sea levels, a boost in the frequency and intensity of high-tide coastal flooding, will be observed, which is also known as nuisance flooding. He added that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, the global temperatures will soar even higher. In such a situation, the sea level rise by the century’s end may be more than what has been projected in the 2022 update.
Dr Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, who directs the NASA Ocean Physics Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington said that NASA’s synopsis of global sea-level rise combined with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) estimates of extreme water levels and the US Geological Survey’s impact studies gives a robust estimate of the projected future that American coastal communities may witness.
NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said that this is a global wake-up call and provides Americans with the needed information to act now to better position themselves for the future. The updated data can inform coastal communities about current and future susceptibilities in the face of climate change and can help them make smart decisions to keep people and property safe.
Sea level Rise Research
The Global and Regional Sea Level Rise report incorporates sea-level projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. The IPCC reports are issued every five to seven years and provide global evaluations of Earth’s climate and uses analysis based on computer simulations along with other data.
A separate report known as the Fifth National Climate Assessment is awaited. The report is produced by the US Global Change Research Program and is the latest in a series that summarizes the impacts of climate change in the US. The report will deliver a final analysis after analyzing the results from the Global and Regional Sea Level Rise report. The Assessment is planned to be published in 2023.
