[xaxsacsdaffbnk]

Is it even solid science to measure sea levels over 2 months? How do you measure "sea level"? It seems normal that ice melts as summer comes around. So there would be fluctuations in sea level? How do they account for all the possible variations to establish a sea level number?

[seszett]

> How do you measure "sea level"?

A lot of places around the world have rulers that are fixed to the ground and have been regularly read for many decades.

The process is basically that one person reads the level at regular intervals for several minutes throughout the day (every 5 seconds for 4 minutes, once every hour for 8 hours, starting 4 hours before high tide in my case, not sure if it's exactly the same everywhere). The place is sheltered from waves.

Since tide effects are very well known and there are a lot of such stations, it is actually easy to get an accurate image of the global sea level from all these measurements.

Nowadays, they are also complemented by GPS-based measurements, and the stations themselves are also GPS-monitored in order to prevent long-term ground movement from adding bias to measurements.

Since the measurements are done on a global scale (in my case, I performed those while I was stationed on Kerguelen island) and since they have been done for so long in always the same way, they do allow to compare current results to any previous results with much better precision than 2mm.

[xaxsacsdaffbnk]

I have no issue believing you can measure sea levels at certain places. The question is, how do you mix all those measurements together to determine a global sea level number?

Afaik many things affect local measurements, like storms and tides.

For example, if you measure at three points in the US, and one point in Japan, how are the measurements weighted?

Suppose a storm is blowing in the US, increasing the measurements by 1m. How is it being accounted for?

[seszett]

Well actually, the total amount of ocean water stays constant during a storm. The quantity of rainwater that falls is absolutely negligible, and the surge caused by wind means the water level falls very slightly in the areas that are not affected by the very localized surge.

That's why you don't measure "three points in the US and one point in Japan". You measure thousands of points all around the world, so if storms affect two or three of them for a day, the global result isn't significantly affected. For instance, just the French observation network is made up of 90 stations that cover enough of the globe to be enough on their own for measuring a 2 mm rise over two months (near real-time data available on ftp://ftp.sonel.org/tidegauge/rmsl/Demerliac/RAW/).

It's really not as complicated as you think it is, the basic science behind global sea level measurements was established in the 18th century.

[yodsanklai]

I suppose they measure the missing ice, and deduce the sea level.

[bregma]

They don't measure the missing ice either. They estimate it based on all kinds of things (mostly models based on what they guess the answer should be). Some of the actual measurements include the deviation in satellite orbit as it passes over Greenland, from which they estimate the change in gravity, which leads directly to an estimate of the change in mass. Since the rock is unlikely to be changing on the time scale of a year or so, they assume it's a change in ice mass. Given a typical annual precipitation of zero in central Greenland, it's a safe bet that any change is mass is due to ice melt.

[xaxsacsdaffbnk]

And how is sea level defined - the average over the year? So more ice has melted than usually? Even then, it seems normal that not the same amount of ice would melt every year?

[ekianjo]

This, and satellites don't have millimeter-level precision of sea level measurement. Not even close.

[imtringued]

We also don't have nano meter precision calipers and yet we managed to measure the size of atoms...

[aww_dang]

Perhaps less funding for the researchers or clickthroughs for the journalists would accompany a failure to provide such a conclusion?