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As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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A new study shows that the scientific community is widely misrepresenting sea level rise, especially in coastal areas of the Southern Hemisphere, due to inaccuracies in geoid models.
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An analysis of 385 sea level measurements made during the Coastal Science Experiment showed that 99% of the measurements either relied on these geoid models, incorrectly combined data sets, or simply did not explain how they measured sea level.
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The authors recommend eliminating geoid models from coastal science and propose a supercomputer-derived data set that more accurately represents global sea levels.
Science is only as good as the data base on which it is built, and a new study from researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands suggests that estimates of future sea level rise may be worryingly underestimated.
This isn’t the first time scientific misunderstandings have caused sea level data to be inconsistent with reality. inaccurate assumptions glacier melt rate This resulted in a serious underestimation of sea levels that had to be corrected ten years ago. But the new data confusion stems from inconsistencies in how we measure sea level broadly in scientific studies. The geoid is a convenient mathematical model for calculating global mean sea level based on gravity and the Earth’s rotation. Since the Earth is not a perfect sphere, these models can help scientists accurately calculate sea levels when conducting scientific research in coastal areas—or at least that’s what we think.
A new study is published in diary nature This hypothesis was scrutinized by analyzing hundreds of scientific research publications using geoid models in studies of coastlines around the world. One limitation of geoid models is that they assume a calm ocean, which actually underestimates important dynamics such as winds, tides, and ocean currents. In northern Europe and the United States, where oceans are generally calmer and scientists have more data sources on sea level rise, these differences are small, but in other parts of the world such as Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the gap between assumed and actual sea levels is small. real Rising sea levels are a cause for concern.
“Researchers studying land elevation or sea level try to make their elevation models as accurate as possible,” said Philip Minderhoud of Wageningen University, who co-authored the study with colleague Katharina Seeger. said in a press statement. “Most researchers […] There appears to be no awareness of the need to use and correctly adjust land and sea measurements when conducting coastal impact assessments. “
Mindehood first cast doubt on the accuracy of the geoid model while conducting research in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in 2015, when he discovered that temperatures in the delta, one of the largest in the world, were lower than what the geoid model suggested. He published these findings in the journal nature communications In 2019, they wrote at the time: “Our results imply significant uncertainties in estimates of sea level rise impacts in the Mekong Delta and global deltas, with errors likely exceeding a century of sea level rise.” This intuition proved correct, and Seager similarly discovered the inaccuracies while working on his Ph.D. A study along the Ayeyarwady Delta in Myanmar.
After poring over hundreds of studies over two years, the researchers concluded that 99 percent of the studies they examined either neglected to use sea level measurements (instead relying on geoid models), incorrectly combined the data sets, or simply failed to explain the methods behind the sea level numbers. While such systematic mismeasurements could have catastrophic effects in these water delta regions, the study also found that the opposite could also be true – for example, sea levels in Antarctica are lower than scientists assumed.
Mindehood and Seager say geoid models should no longer be used in coastal studies, and they even propose an alternative. The researchers used supercomputers to combine four elevation models with the latest sea level measurements, allowing scientists to obtain highly accurate sea level measurements here and now.
“That’s how science works,” Mindehood said in a press statement. “Now that we’ve discovered this blind spot, the scientific community can make more accurate assessments of coastal areas and cities around the world.”
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