Regional patterns of sea level change in the German North Sea related to global scale patterns - Are IPCC projections reliable for regional planning purposes?

摘要

Regional and especially global sea level changes have been intensively studied in the recent past. This contribution focuses on presenting the results from analysing observed mean sea level changes in the south-eastern part of the North Sea. Data sets from 13 tide gauges covering the entire German North Sea coastline and the time period from 1843 to 2008 have been used to estimate high quality mean sea level time series. The overall results from nonlinear smoothing and linear trend analyses for different time spans are presented. An accelerated sea level rise is detected for a period at the end of the 19th century and for the recent decades. The comparison with global sea level reconstructions reveals the existence of different patterns of sea level change and highlights the urgency to derive reliable regional sea level projections for coastal planning strategies. The reconstruction for the German Bight and a North-East-Atlantic sea level reconstruction are in better agreement, at least for the last decades. The paper concludes with a short discussion on how to currently consider future sea level changes for regional coastal zone management strategies.