Sea level rise and coastal hazards are putting human and natural communities along the coasts at greater risk than ever.
Methods for Developing SLR Projections
One of the principal products of the Coastal Resilience Project is a spatially explicit tool that provides forecasts of inundation on the south shore of Long Island under different sea level rise scenarios. These sea level rise projections were developed by faculty at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies based on the best available scientific information about greenhouse gas emissions and sea level rise. Project personnel examined the range of global climate models (GCMs) reviewed by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and chose seven of them to use in forecasting local sea level rise. Greenhouse gas emissions scenarios used in local forecasting, chosen to represent a range of reasonable future emissions from the suite of IPCC SRES scenarios, represent low, medium, and moderately high projections, labeled B1, A1B, and A2 respectively. The methods used by these investigators to develop the projections included in the mapping tool are provided in greater detail here.
Local and global sea level rise forecasts differ in a number of ways. Although the main driver of climate change is atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases associated with fossil fuel combustion, a global phenomenon, some of the parameters that contribute to sea level rise vary locally, including compaction and land subsidence. The Long Island modeling approach also used local values for the thermal expansion of sea water.
