New PROTECT publication on the acceleration of sea-level rise along the Dutch coast

The article “The acceleration of sea-level rise along the coast of the Netherlands started in the 1960s” was published in Ocean Science.

While it is now accepted that global sea level has been accelerating since the 1960^th(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0531-8), it is more difficult to detect acceleration locally because natural variability due to wind, tides and steric expansion is large.

In this new paper at KNMI we use tide gauge data from Rijkswaterstaat going back to 1890 along the Dutch coast and show that here as well there is an acceleration of sea-level rise.

We use a statistical model called Generalized Additive Model (GAM) to fit different models to the tide gauge data using different predictive variables (Tr: Trend, TrNt: Trend and nodal tide, TrNtW: Trend, nodal tide and wind). 

The result is that if we remove the influence of wind and nodal cycle, the rate of sea-level rise over the last 20 years is 2.9 mm/yr, significantly larger than any period of 20 years between 1900 and 1980.