"Changing Sea Levels - effects of tides, weather and climate"

Further Reading.

Readers interested in general questions about changing sea levels can refer to FAQ pages. Here are some I find helpful.

NOAA (perigean spring tides; return periods of high water levels; lunitidal interval; tides in lakes; places with large tidal ranges).

The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (a very useful and comprehensive basic set of questions about tides with examples mainly from the UK) and also a separate section on mean sea level and datums.

The UK Hydrographic Office (predictions; chart datum; spring tides)

Et pour mes amis, Francais: Station Biologique de Roscoff .

also, I recommend Keith's page on tides especially the time lapse photographs of the tides at Halls Harbour, as shown in Figure 4.15 of the book.

This list of recent useful publications will continue to grow.

Chapter One Sea level measurements:

Proceedings of a Workshop on New Technical Developments in Sea and Land Level Observing Systems Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO) (2005) Report 193. Edited by S Holdgate and T Aarup. Reports from a meeting of most of the leading developers of new in situ instrumental ideas. Go to the PSMSL site for an entry.

The 2006 IOC sea level manual is an excellent summary of the choices and issues.It is available as a pdf.

Chapter Four Tidal Dynamics

For an update on big tides in Ungava Bay, see the paper by Arbic et al in Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007)

Chapter Six Weather and other effects

McRobie A, Spencer T and Gerritsen H. (eds) 2005 The Big Flood: North Sea storm surge. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A363: 1261 - 1491. A detailed revisiting of the science of the 1953 floods around the southern North Sea.

JCOMM held a special scientific and technical symposium on flood forecasting in Seoul 2-6 October 2007. More than 50 presentations made to the symposium are available on line. The symposium made several recommendations for more research and for new institutional arrangement for better information exchange and more effective forecasting.

We have a special page containing a discussion of the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami,

There is also a page devoted to the storm surge that flooded New Orleans on 29 August 2005.

Chapter Seven Mean sea level

Church, John A., White, Neil J., Coleman, Richard, Lambeck, Kurt, Mitrovica, Jerry X. (2004) Estimates of the Regional Distribution of Sea Level Rise over the 1950–2000 Period. Journal of Climate , 17 , 2609-2625. This is an important examination of regional mean sea level changes, based on analysis of altimetry data linked to in situ tide gauge data. The relationships are then used with historical tide gauge data to compute regional variations in monthly msl over a 51-year period. Allowing for these regional variations leads to a lower uncertainty in the estimate of a global mean sea level rise of 1.8 +/- 0.3 mm per year over the period.

See also the Wikipedia entry on "sea level rise"

The IPCC Fourth Assessment was published in 2007. The pdf of "The physical science basis" is available on the IPCC web site. A brief summary of the sea level conclusions is available here.

David Pugh has a lecture on the web on "Sea Level and Climate Change" given in Slovenia in May 2007. It's long (an hour and twenty minutes), and informal..!

You can help develop the site as a resource for other readers by sending suggestions for adding to these pages. I will be updating the material at regular intervals, and will gladly acknowledge the sources of all suggestions that are used.

And for futher reading about further reading!visit the PSMSL site.

Cambridge University Press publishes a range of related books in oceanography and marine science and anyone wishing to publish a new book in this area should contact Dr Susan Francis: sfrancis@cambridge.org

Contact: d.pugh@mac.com