A statistical protocol for a holistic adjustment of global sea level budget

Abstract

Abstract Current studies in global mean sea level, GMSL, studies assess the closure/misclosure of the GMSL budget components and their uncertainties. Because Earth’s hydrosphere conserves water, a closed global mean sea level budget with a consistent set of estimates and their statistics is necessary. An unclosed budget means that there are problems to be addressed such as biases in the budget components, unreliable error statistics about the estimates, unknown or known but unmodeled budget components. In a misclosed global mean sea level budget, as practiced in recent studies, the trend estimates for the budget components and their errors account only for the anomalies of each budget component in isolation. On the other hand, the trend of each series must consider the trends of the other series in tandem such that the global mean sea level budget is closed for a holistic assessment, which can only be achieved by adjusting global mean sea level budget components simultaneously. In this study, we demonstrate a statistical protocol to ameliorate this deficiency, which potentially have implications for future sea level science studies, including the future Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports, and the US Climate Assessment Reports.