Sea level @ NIOZ

Scientists find three years left of remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C 19 June 2025, Bonn – The central estimate of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is 130 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) (from the beginning of 2025). This would be exhausted in a little more than three years at current levels of CO2 emissions, according to the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change study published today in the journal Earth System Science Data, and the budget for 1.6°C or 1.7°C could be exceeded within nine years. Prof. Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and lead author of the study, said: “Our third annual edition of Indicators of Global Climate Change shows that both warming levels and rates of warming are unprecedented. Continued record-high emissions of greenhouse gases mean more of us are experiencing unsafe levels of climate impacts. Temperatures have risen year-on-year since the last IPCC report in 2021, highlighting how...

This spring, we welcomed a new group member: Elisa van Merkesteijn. Elisa will be working in the DARSea project, where she will focus on the modelling of regional sea-level change in the past century. It's great to have her on board!  In April we took part in the EGU25 general assembly in Vienna, where we co-convened the sea-level session: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/session/52385 . It was, as always, a very nice session to be part of, and we enjoyed all the great talks and posters in the session! We're looking forward to next year!  A big milestone was the finishing of the PROTECT project, a H2020 project that we've been involved in from beginning to end, and which has been a great success. There is still work ongoing in writing up the final results, so it is not the real end, but the formal collaboration has ended which is bittersweet after such a long time of working together. Our overall messages and key output can be found by clicking on the image be...

The Department of Estuarine and Delta Systems (EDS) is looking for a highly motivated PhD candidate with a background in physical geography, oceanography or meteorology. The position is part of a larger project which addresses the challenge of reconstructing and attributing 20th century regional sea-level changes using observations and model simulations. The project was awarded to Dr. Slangen in the Vidi Talent Programme scheme funded by NWO. This 4-year PhD position, starting from 1 January 2025, is in close collaboration with Utrecht University (Department of Physical Geography) and NORCE (Bergen, Norway). Applications are welcome here

This spring, the NIOZ sea level group has been well-represented at national and international conferences. It is great to see everyone giving their presentations, posters, and strengthen current and forge new collaborations.    [NIOZ sea level group @NAC24]     [Sea level session dinner @ EGU24] 

  Two NIOZ researchers have receive Vidi grants of 800,000 euros. The laureates are Dr Aimée Slangen, for solving the regional sea-level puzzle and Dr Rick Hennekam, for investigating tipping points in climate and ocean systems. These grants will enable them to develop an innovative line of research over the next five years and further expand their own research group. Project DARSea: Solving the regional sea-level puzzle Sea-level change is driven by a combination of different processes, each acting on their own temporal and spatial scales. It is a complex puzzle, which has not yet been solved on a regional scale. This Vidi project will combine observations and models of regional sea-level change with a new approach to find optimal regions which allow for the puzzle to be solved. The goal is to better understand the different causes of regional sea-level change in the 20th century, which leads to better future projections.   In this Vidi project, I will use improved observatio...

Last Thursday, 15 June, Carolina sucessfully defended her PhD at TU Delft.  In the presence of her family and friends, she responded to the tough questions from the examination panel. The questions covered all aspects of her thesis, from the steric and mass contributions, to the budget and the tools used to find optimal regions.  Her thesis contains her three published papers: Exploring Sources of Uncertainty in Steric Sea‐Level Change Estimates Trends and Uncertainties of Regional Barystatic Sea-level Change in the Satellite Altimetry Era   Regionalizing the Sea-level Budget With Machine Learning Techniques   After the defense, Carolina was awarded the title of Dr!  Carolina will now move to Woods Hole Institute in the US for a postdoctoral fellowship. We are sad to see her leave and will miss her, but ofcourse we wish her lots of fun and interesting science in her next endeavours!  

Assessment of How Climate Scientists Communicate Risk Shows Imperfections, Improvements The hardest part, experts find, is communicating “unquantifiable” uncertainty Scientists have long struggled to find the best way to present crucial facts about future sea level rise, but are getting better at communicating more clearly, according to an international group of climate scientists, including Aimée Slangen from NIOZ and Tim Hermans from Utrecht University. The consequences of improving communications are enormous, the scientists said, as civic leaders actively incorporate climate scientists’ risk assessments into major planning efforts to counter some of the effects of rising seas. Writing in Nature Climate Change, the scientists review the language and graphics used in climate “assessment” reports between 1990 and 2021 by members of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Future sea level rise emerges from a lot of different ...