The global sea level is rising at a quicker pace over the past 20 years than data had previously suggested.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Nature reexamined climate data spanning 1900 to 1990, which saw an average increase of 1.2mm per year. However, their calculations suggested that the sea level rose an average of 3mm annually since 1990.
"Our estimates from 1993 to 2010 agree with [the prior] estimates from modern tide gauges and satellite altimetry, within the bounds of uncertainty. But that means that the acceleration into the last two decades is far worse than previously thought," study lead author Carling Hay, of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., told BBC News. "This new acceleration is about 25% higher than previous estimates."
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pegged the average sea level rise between 1900 and 1990 at 1.5mm annually. The new study would suggest a bit more of a dramatic increase in the last two decades, Reuters reported.
"What we have done, which is a bit different from past studies, is use physical models and statistical models to try to look for underlying patterns in the messy tide gauge data observations," Hay told BBC News. "Each of the different contributions actually produces a unique pattern, or fingerprint, of sea-level change. And what we try to do is model these underlying patterns and then use our statistical approach to look for the patterns in the tide gauge observations. That allows us to infer global information from the very limited records."
