Sea Level Rise and Ice Sheet Instabilities
IPCC Expert Meeting Report of 21–24 June 2010
Sea level rise is one of the major long-term consequences of human-induced climate change. Future projections of sea level changes and their regional expression are of crucial importance for the sustainability of coastal settlements around the world.
The Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC (AR4) had comprehensively assessed key processes contributing to past, present and future sea level changes. However, process understanding was limited and thus both size and uncertainties associated with some of these contributions remained still largely unknown. This also hampered the overall projections of global mean sea level rise in AR4. The future dynamical behaviour of the large polar ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland in a changing climate was identified as the primary origin of the large uncertainty in the AR4 projections of sea level rise for the 21st century.
The meeting report covers oceanography, ice sheet dynamics, glacier research and hydrology and discusses latest results from both observations and modelling relevant for sea level change.
Standard identifier: ISBN 978-92-9169-130-2