Complementing thermosteric sea level rise estimates

Abstract

Thermal expansion of seawater has been one of the most important contributors to global sea level rise (SLR) over the past 100 years. Yet, observational estimates of this volumetric response of the world's oceans to temperature changes are sparse and mostly limited to the ocean's upper 700 m. Furthermore, only a part of the available climate model data is sufficiently diagnosed to complete our quantitative understanding of thermosteric SLR (thSLR). Here, we extend the available set of thSLR diagnostics from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), analyze those model results in order to complement upper-ocean observations and enable the development of surrogate techniques t..