Reports

Submitted on September 22, 2006
Accepted on December 4, 2006

A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise

Stefan Rahmstorf ^1*

¹ Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany.

A semi-empirical relation is presented which connects global sea level rise to global mean surface temperature. It is proposed that for time scales relevant to anthropogenic warming, the rate of sea level rise is approximately proportional to the magnitude of warming above the pre-industrial temperature. This holds to good approximation for temperature and sea level changes during the 20th Century, with a proportionality constant of 3.4 mm/yr/°C. When applied to future warming scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this relationship results in a sea level rise in 2100 of 0.5 - 1.4 m above the 1990 level.