skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: GESLA Version 3: A major update to the global higher‐frequency sea‐level dataset
This paper describes a major update to the quasi-global, higher-frequency sea-level dataset known as GESLA (Global Extreme Sea Level Analysis). Versions 1 (released 2009) and 2 (released 2016) of the dataset have been used in many published studies, across a wide range of oceanographic and coastal engineering-related investigations concerned with evaluating tides, storm surges, extreme sea levels, and other related processes. The third version of the dataset (released 2021), presented here, contains double the number of years of data, and nearly four times the number of records, compared to Version 2. The dataset consists of records obtained from multiple sources around the world. This paper describes the assembly of the dataset, its processing, and its format, and outlines potential future improvements  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2013280
PAR ID:
10417438
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Geoscience Data Journal
ISSN:
2049-6060
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract. This paper describes version 2.0 of the Global Change and Air Pollution (GCAP 2.0) model framework, a one-way offline coupling between version E2.1 of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) general circulation model (GCM) and the GEOS-Chem global 3-D chemical-transport model (CTM). Meteorology for driving GEOS-Chem has been archived from the E2.1 contributions to phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) for the pre-industrial era and the recent past. In addition, meteorology is available for the near future and end of the century for seven future scenarios ranging from extreme mitigation to extreme warming. Emissions and boundary conditions have been prepared for input to GEOS-Chem that are consistent with the CMIP6 experimental design. The model meteorology, emissions, transport, and chemistry are evaluated in the recent past and found to be largely consistent with GEOS-Chem driven by the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) product and with observational constraints. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract. Rising seas are a threat to human and natural systems along coastlines. The relation between global warming and sea level rise is established, but the quantification of impacts of historical sea level rise on a global scale is largely absent. To foster such quantification, here we present a reconstruction of historical hourly (1979–2015) and monthly (1900–2015) coastal water levels and a corresponding counterfactual without long-term trends in sea level. The dataset pair allows for impact attribution studies that quantify the contribution of sea level rise to observed changes in coastal systems following the definition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Impacts are ultimately caused by water levels that are relative to the local land height, which makes the inclusion of vertical land motion a necessary step. Also, many impacts are driven by sub-daily extreme water levels. To capture these aspects, the factual data combine reconstructed geocentric sea level on a monthly timescale since 1900, vertical land motion since 1900 and hourly storm-tide variations since 1979. The inclusion of observation-based vertical land motion brings the trends of the combined dataset closer to tide gauge records in most cases, but outliers remain. Daily maximum water levels get in closer agreement with tide gauges through the inclusion of intra-annual ocean density variations. The counterfactual data are derived from the factual data through subtraction of the quadratic trend. The dataset is made available openly through the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) at https://doi.org/10.48364/ISIMIP.749905 (Treu et al., 2023a). 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract Medicanes, hurricane‐like cyclonic systems in the Mediterranean Sea, are becoming an increasingly severe problem for many Mediterranean countries because climate projections suggest a higher risk under anthropogenic forcing even under an intermediate scenario. Due to the small size of these weather systems, high‐resolution data are required to better resolve their structure and evolution. Here we investigate medicanes from the perspective of precipitation using the high‐resolution (0.25°) ERA‐5 reanalysis data released by European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts. Overall, we identify a total of 59 medicanes from ERA‐5 data during 1979–2017, with marked year‐to‐year variability. These storms tend to occur mostly between September and March. Overall, the intensity of medicanes (i.e., maximum wind) is lower than that of tropical cyclones, and this is also true for precipitation. The composite precipitation of medicanes increases from the centre to ~0.8° and then decreases. During 1979–2017, many regions along the Mediterranean Sea experienced over 20 extreme precipitation events (i.e., days) which were caused by medicanes, accounting for 2–5% of all the extreme precipitation events. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Plants display a range of temporal patterns of inter‐annual reproduction, from relatively constant seed production to “mast seeding,” the synchronized and highly variable interannual seed production of plants within a population. Previous efforts have compiled global records of seed production in long‐lived plants to gain insight into seed production, forest and animal population dynamics, and the effects of global change on masting. Existing datasets focus on seed production dynamics at the population scale but are limited in their ability to examine community‐level mast seeding dynamics across different plant species at the continental scale. We harmonized decades of plant reproduction data for 141 woody plant species across nine Long‐Term Ecological Research (LTER) or long‐term ecological monitoring sites from a wide range of habitats across the United States. Plant reproduction data are reported annually between 1957 and 2021 and based on either seed traps or seed and/or cone counts on individual trees. A wide range of woody plant species including trees, shrubs, and lianas are represented within sites allowing for direct community‐level comparisons among species. We share code for filtering of data that enables the comparison of plot and individual tree data across sites. For each species, we compiled relevant life history attributes (e.g., seed mass, dispersal syndrome, seed longevity, sexual system) that may serve as important predictors of mast seeding in future analyses. To aid in phylogenetically informed analyses, we also share a phylogeny and phylogenetic distance matrix for all species in the dataset. These data can be used to investigate continent‐scale ecological properties of seed production, including individual and population variability, synchrony within and across species, and how these properties of seed production vary in relation to plant species traits and environmental conditions. In addition, these data can be used to assess how annual variability in seed production is associated with climate conditions and how that varies across populations, species, and regions. The dataset is released under a CC0 1.0 Universal public domain license. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Accurate historical records of Earth’s surface temperatures are central to climate research and policy development. Widely-used estimates based on instrumental measurements from land and sea are, however, not fully consistent at either global or regional scales. To address these challenges, we develop the Dynamically Consistent ENsemble of Temperature (DCENT), a 200-member ensemble of monthly surface temperature anomalies relative to the 1982–2014 climatology. Each DCENT member starts from 1850 and has a 5° × 5° resolution. DCENT leverages several updated or recently-developed approaches of data homogenization and bias adjustments: an optimized pairwise homogenization algorithm for identifying breakpoints in land surface air temperature records, a physics-informed inter-comparison method to adjust systematic offsets in sea-surface temperatures recorded by ships, and a coupled energy balance model to homogenize continental and marine records. Each approach was published individually, and this paper describes a combined approach and its application in developing a gridded analysis. A notable difference of DCENT relative to existing temperature estimates is a cooler baseline for 1850–1900 that implies greater historical warming. 
    more » « less