Arctic Sea Level Change over the altimetry era and reconstructed over the last 60 years

The Arctic Ocean process severe limitations on the use of altimetry and tide gauge data for sea level studies and prediction due to the presence of seasonal or permanent sea ice. In order to overcome this issue we reprocessed all altimetry data with editing tailored to Arctic conditions, hereby more than doubling the amount of altimetry in the Arctic Ocean with up to 10 times the amount of data in regions like the Beaufort Gyre region compared with AVISO and RADS datasets. With recent data from the Cryosat-2 SAR altimetry the time-series now runs from 1991-2015 a total of nearly 25 years.

Good altimetric data is seen to crucial for sea level studies and profoundly for sea level reconstruction where we present a 60 years sea level reconstruction based on this new data set. We here present a new multi-decade altimetric dataset and a 60 year reconstruction of sea level based on this together with tide gauge information. From our reconstruction, we found that the Arctic mean sea level trend is around 1.5 mm +/- 0.3 mm/y for the period 1950 to 2010, between 68ºN and 82ºN. This value is in good agreement with the global mean trend of 1.8 +/- 0.3 mm/y over the same period as found by Church and White (2004). We also find significant higher trend in the Beaufort Gyre region showing an increase in sea level over the last decade up to 2011.