Estimating Vertical Land Motion in Northern Adriatic Sea with Coastal Altimetry and In Situ Observations

Author(s):  
Francesco De Biasio ◽  
Stefano Vignudelli ◽  
Giorgio Baldin

<p align="justify"><span>The European Space Agency, in the framework of the Sea Level Climate Change Initiative (SL_CCI), is developing consistent and long-term satellite-based data-sets to study climate-scale variations of sea level globally and in the coastal zone. Two altimetry data-sets were recently produced. The first product is generated over a grid of 0.25x0.25 degrees, merging and homogenizing the various satellite altimetry missions. The second product that is still experimental is along track over a grid of 0.35 km. An operational production of climate-oriented altimeter sea level products has just started in the framework of the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and a daily-mean product is now available over a grid of 0.125x0.125 degrees covering the global ocean since 1993 to present.</span></p><p align="justify"><span>We made a comparison of the SL_CCI satellite altimetry dataset with sea level time series at selected tide gauges in the Mediterranean Sea, focusing on Venice and Trieste. There, the coast is densely covered by civil settlements and industrial areas with a strongly rooted seaside tourism, and tides and storm-related surges reach higher levels than in most of the Mediterranean Sea, causing damages and casualties as in the recent storm of November 12th, 2019: the second higher water registered in Venice since 1872. Moreover, in the Venice area the ground displacements exhibit clear negative trends which deepen the effects of the absolute sea level rise.</span></p><p align="justify"><span>Several authors have pointed out the synergy between satellite altimetry and tide gauges to corroborate evidences of ground displacements. Our contribution aims at understanding the role played by subsidence, estimated by the diffence between coastal altimetry and in situ measurements, on the local sea level rise. A partial validation of these estimates has been made against GPS-derived values, in order to distinguish the contributions of subsidence and eustatism. This work will contribute to identify problems and challenges to extend the sea level climate record to the coastal zone with quality comparable to the open ocean, and also to assess the suitability of altimeter-derived absolute sea levels as a tool to estimate subsidence from tide gauge measurement in places where permanent GPS receivers are not available.</span></p>

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos Flokos ◽  
Maria Tsakiri

<p>corresponding author: N.Flokos</p><p>[email protected]</p><p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Sea level change is one of the key indicators of climate change with numerous effects such as flooding, erosion of beaches, salt intrusion.  The detailed global picture of sea level and the monitoring of its spatial-temporal changes is performed by Satellite Altimetry (SA). Nowadays, SA data compare well with measurements from the global tide gauge network, but the aim of 0.3 mm/year accuracy in the altimeter derived rate of global mean sea level rise is still not fully met. </p><p>Whilst the precise determination of global and regional sea level rise from SA data is promising, there is however an observational gap in our knowledge regarding the coastal zone. While Tide Gauges (TG) are usually located at the coast, therefore providing coastal sea level measurements, altimeters have difficulties there. Filling this gap becomes important when considering that the impact of sea level rise can be devastating on the coast with effects on society and ecosystems. This makes it even more significant knowing that there are many stretches of the world’s coast that still do not possess in situ level measuring devices.  </p><p>This work aims to discuss the available data and methods that link the SA measurements of sea level rise with TG measurements. Whilst there is rich literature on relevant applications, it is important to have a clear and concise methodology on this.</p><p>Tide gauge data</p><p>Several post processing steps need to be applied to the raw TG data to enrich the raw Sea Surface Heights (SSH) values and make them comparable with SA data. There are several geophysical corrections, such as pressure and wind effects, which can be applied to TG data in order to deduce  Sea Level (SL) and be consistent with altimeter data. High frequency atmospheric effects on TG data are corrected using the Dynamic Atmospheric Correction (DAC) provided by AVISO. One other large uncertainty is the vertical stability of the TG benchmark over time. TG data must be corrected for the Vertical Land Motion (VLM) to enable the comparison of two sea level measurements (TG and SA) and their later integration within the surfaces of the absolute sea heights. The main VLM dataset can be obtained from SONEL database (SONEL 2016) which provides crustal velocities from the continuous GNSS measurements at sites collocated to the TG.</p><p>Satellite altimetry data</p><p>Whilst Satellite Altimetry over the open ocean is a mature discipline, global altimetry data collected over the coastal ocean remain still largely unexploited. This is because of intrinsic difficulties in the corrections and issues of land contamination in the footprint that have so far resulted in systematic flagging and rejection of these data. In this work, the relevant methodology to overcome these problems and extend the capabilities of current and future altimeters to the coastal zone (coastal altimetry) will be discussed and a number of coastal altimetry data sets will be used (eg SARvatore, X-TRACK, RADS etc). Finally, a practical example using real data sets over the Aegean Sea will be presented. </p><p> </p><p> </p>


MAUSAM ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-198
Author(s):  
HADDAD MAHDI ◽  
TAIBI HEBIB ◽  
MOKRANE MOUSTAFA ◽  
HAMMOUMI HOUSSEYN

By considering time series from satellite altimetry and tide gauges that extend back to 1993, Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) is applied to investigate and compare the non linear trends of the sea level along the Mediterranean coasts. The major issue of this comparison is to show if the satellite altimetry data could be representative of the local sea level as observed by tide gauges.   The results indicate that the local trends estimated from an in-situ tide gauge and satellite altimetry data show nearly identical positive rates over the period from 1993 to 2017. The differences between the estimated rates of sea level change from in-situ tide gauge and satellite measurements vary, in absolute value, from 0.18 to 4.29 mm/year with an average of 1.55 mm/year.   This result is sufficient to admit, if necessary, on the one hand, the complementarily of the two measurement techniques (satellite altimetry and tide gauges) and, on the other hand, the rise in sea level near the Mediterranean coastal areas.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco De Biasio ◽  
Stefano Vignudelli

<p>Consistent long-term satellite-based data-sets of sea surface elevation exist nowadays to study sea level variability, globally and at regional scales. Two of them are suitable for climate-related studies: one produced in the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA)-funded Sea Level Climate Change Initiative (SL_CCI); the other offered by the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Both data-sets cover the global ocean since 1993 to 2015 (SL_CCI) and to present (C3S) at spatial resolution of 0.25 x 0.25 degrees. The first is obtained by merging data from all the available satellite altimetry missions. The second one relies only on a couple of simultaneous altimetry missions at a time to provide stable long-term variability estimates of sea level, is constantly updated and has resolution 0.125 x 0.125 degrees in the Mediterranean Sea.<br>Previous studies have investigated the relationship between satellite-derived absolute sea level change rates and tide gauge observations of relative sea level change in littoral zones of the Mediterranean basin [Fenoglio-Mark, L., 2002; Fenoglio-Mark et al., 2012]. Other studies made use also of global positioning system measurements of vertical land motion in addition to tide gauge and satellite altimetry data [Rocco F.V., 2015; Zerbini et al., 2017]. Vignudelli et al., [2018] highlighted the difficulty of deriving spatially-consistent information on the sea level rates at regional scale in the Adriatic Sea. Other studies have claimed the possibility to merge locally isolated information into a coherent regional picture using a linear inverse problem approach [Wöppelmann and Marcos, 2012]: such approach has been successfully applied to a number of tide gauges in the Adriatic Sea [De Biasio et al., 2020]. The approach tested in the Adriatic Sea is going to be extended to the Mediterranean and major findings will be presented at conference.<br>The motivation of this study is that industrial areas are widely spread along the littoral zone of the southern Europe, and residential settlements are densely scattered along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Not least, a strongly rooted seaside tourism is one of the main economic resources of the region, which is particularly exposed to the sea level variability of both natural and anthropogenic origin. A well known example of such a exposition is Venice (northern Italy) which has been recently hit by the second-highest tide in recorded history (November 2019), and is being protected against storm surges by the MOSE barrier since October 2020. Therefore, a re-analyses of the actual sea level rates with novel methodologies that take into account a better usage of all available observations is key to understand the future coastal sea level changes and their relative importance.</p><p>Fenoglio-Marc, L. 2002. DOI: 10.1016/S1474-7065(02)00084-0</p><p>Fenoglio-Marc, L.; Braitenberg, C.; Tunini, L. 2012. DOI: 10.1016/j.pce.2011.05.014</p><p>Rocco, F.V. Ph.D. Thesis, 2015. URI: https://amslaurea.unibo.it/id/eprint/10172</p><p>Zerbini, S.; Raicich, F.; Prati, C.M.; Bruni, S.; Conte, S.D.; Errico, M.; Santi, E. 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2017.02.009</p><p>Vignudelli, S., De Biasio, F., Scozzari, A. Zecchetto, S., and Papa, A. 2019. DOI:10.1007/1345_2018_51</p><p>Wöppelmann, G. and Marcos, M. 2012. DOI: 10.1029/2011JC007469</p><p>De Biasio, F., Baldin, G. and Vignudelli, S. 2020. DOI:10.3390/jmse8110949</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Vignudelli ◽  
Francesco De Biasio

<p>Consistent and long-term satellite-based data-sets to study climate-scale variations of sea level globally and in the coastal zone are available nowadays. Two altimetry data-sets were recently produced: the first one is generated by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sea Level Climate Change Initiative (SL_CCI) over a grid of 0.25 x 0.25 degrees, merging and homogenizing the various available satellite altimetry missions. The second one is a climate-oriented altimeter sea level product that started in the framework of the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), and is now released as daily-means over a grid of 0.25 x 0.25 degrees, covering the global ocean since 1993 to present. Both reach in the Arctic the latitude of 81.5 N degrees. Therefore, these new altimetry products cover the coastal area surrounding Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard Islands, Norway), where a tide gauge station is active since 1976. Near the Svalbard coasts also the along track surface elevations of the CryoSat-2 mission are made available through the European Space Agency’s Grid Processing on Demand (G-POD) for Earth Observation Applications facility.</p><p>In this study, we compare sea level measurements from the Ny-Ålesund tide gauge with the climate-oriented altimeter sea level gridded products (SL_CCI and C3S) and with the along track data from the only CryoSat-2 mission. This study has three objectives: 1) to assess the performances of the gridded data moving from offshore to near coasts; 2) to explore how the synergy with along track high resolution CryoSat-2 data might help to detail the sea ice impact on the observation of relative and absolute sea level rise around Svalbard; 3) to verify if the differences between satellite altimetry and tide gauges can be used as a proxy of vertical ground movement in the study area by adopting the approaches elaborated in Vignudelli et al. [2018] and De Biasio et al. [2020] that can be validated with ground vertical displacements estimated using Global Positioning System (GPS) data from the stations close to Ny-Ålesund.</p><p> </p><p>REFERENCES</p><p>Vignudelli, S., De Biasio, F., Scozzari, A. Zecchetto, S., and Papa, A. (2019): Sea Level Trends and Variability in the Adriatic Sea and Around Venice, Proceedings of the International Review Workshop on Satellite Altimetry Cal/Val Activities and Applications, 23-26 April 2018, Chania, Crete, Greece. DOI:10.1007/1345_2018_51</p><p>De Biasio, F.; Baldin, G.; Vignudelli, S. Revisiting Vertical Land Motion and Sea Level Trends in the Northeastern Adriatic Sea Using Satellite Altimetry and Tide Gauge Data. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2020, 8, 949. DOI:10.3390/jmse8110949</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Mir Calafat ◽  
Thomas Frederikse ◽  
Kevin Horsburgh ◽  
Nadim Dayoub

<p>Sea-level change is geographically non-uniform, with regional departures that can reach several times the global average. Characterizing this spatial variability and understanding its causes is crucial to the design of adaptation strategies for sea-level rise. This, as it turns out, is no easy feat, primarily due to the sparseness of the observational sea-level record in time and space. Long tide gauge records are restricted to a few locations along the coast. Satellite altimetry offers a better spatial coverage but only since 1992. In the Mediterranean Sea, the tide gauge network is heavily biased towards the European shorelines, with only one record with at least 35 years of data on the African coasts. Past studies have attempted to address the difficulties related to this data sparseness in the Mediterranean Sea by combining the available tide gauge records with satellite altimetry observations. The vast majority of such studies represent sea level through a combination of altimetry-derived empirical orthogonal functions whose temporal amplitudes are then inferred from the tide gauge data. Such methods, however, have tremendous difficulty in separating trends and variability, make no distinction between relative and geocentric sea level, and tell us nothing about the causes of sea level changes. Here, we combine observational data from tide gauges and altimetry with sea-level fingerprints of land-mass changes through a Bayesian hierarchical model to quanify the sources of sea-level rise since 1960 at any arbitrary location in the Mediterranean Sea. We find that Mediterranean sea level rose at a relatively low rate from 1960 to 1990, primarily due to dynamic sea-level changes in the nearby Atlantic, at which point it started rising significantly faster with comparable contributions from dynamic sea level and land-mass changes.</p>


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Athanasia Iona ◽  
Athanasios Theodorou ◽  
Sarantis Sofianos ◽  
Sylvain Watelet ◽  
Charles Troupin ◽  
...  

Abstract. We present a new product composed of a set of thermohaline climatic indices from 1950 to 2015 for the Mediterranean Sea such as decadal temperature and salinity anomalies, their mean values over selected depths, decadal ocean heat and salt content anomalies at selected depth layers as well as their long times series. It is produced from a new high-resolution climatology of temperature and salinity on a 1/8° regular grid based on historical high quality in situ observations. Ocean heat and salt content differences between 1980–2015 and 1950–1979 are compared for evaluation of the climate shift in the Mediterranean Sea. The spatial patterns of heat and salt content shifts demonstrate in greater detail than ever before that the climate changes differently in the several regions of the basin. Long time series of heat and salt content for the period 1950 to 2015 are also provided which indicate that in the Mediterranean Sea there is a net mean volume warming and salting since 1950 with acceleration during the last two decades. The time series also show that the ocean heat content seems to fluctuate on a cycle of about 40 years and seems to follow the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation climate cycle indicating that the natural large scale atmospheric variability could be superimposed on to the warming trend. This product is an observations-based estimation of the Mediterranean climatic indices. It relies solely on spatially interpolated data produced from in-situ observations averaged over decades in order to smooth the decadal variability and reveal the long term trends with more accuracy. It can provide a valuable contribution to the modellers' community, next to the satellite-based products and serve as a baseline for the evaluation of climate-change model simulations contributing thus to a better understanding of the complex response of the Mediterranean Sea to the ongoing global climate change. The product is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1210100.


2006 ◽  
Vol 177 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludovic Mocochain ◽  
Georges Clauzon ◽  
Jean-Yves Bigot

Abstract The Messinian salinity crisis is typically recorded by evaporites in the abyssal plains of the Mediterranean Sea and by canyons incised into the Mediterranean margins and their hinterlands. However, the impacts of crisis on geomorphology and surface dynamics lasted, until canyons were filled by sediments in the Pliocene (fig. 2). In the mid-Rhône valley, the Ardeche Cretaceous carbonate platform is incised over 600 m by the Rhône Messinian canyon. The canyon thalweg is located – 236 m bsl (below sea level) in the borehole of Pierrelatte [Demarcq, 1960; fig. 1]. During the Pliocene, this canyon was flooded as a ria and infilled by a Gilbert type fan delta [Clauzon and Rubino, 1992; Clauzon et al., 1995]. The whole Messinian-Pliocene third order cycle [Haq et al., 1987] generated four benchmark levels. The first two are [Clauzon, 1996]: (i) The pre-evaporitic abandonment surface which is mapped around the belvedere of Saint-Restitut (fig. 1). This surface is synchronous [Clauzon, 1996] of the crisis onset (5.95 Ma) [Gautier et al., 1994; Krigjsman et al., 1999] and, consequently, is an isochronous benchmark. (ii) The Messinian erosional surface is also an isochronous benchmark due to the fast flooding [Blanc, 2002] of the Rhône canyon, becoming a ria at 5.32 Ma [Hilgen and Langereis, 1988]. These surfaces are the result of endoreic Mediterranean sea level fall more than a thousand meters below the Atlantic Ocean. A huge accommodation space (up to more than 1000 m) was created as sea-level rose up to 80 m above its present-day level (asl) during the Pliocene highstand of cycle TB 3.4 (from 5.32 to 3.8 Ma). During the Lower Pliocene this accommodation space was filled by a Gilbert fan delta. This history yields two other benchmark levels: (i) the marine/non marine Pliocene transition which is an heterochronous surface produced by the Gilbert delta progradation. This surface recorded the Pliocene highstand sea level; (ii) the Pliocene abandonment surface at the top of the Gilbert delta continental wedge. Close to the Rhône-Ardeche confluence, the present day elevations of the four reference levels are (evolution of base-level synthesized in fig. 4): (1) 312 m asl, (2) 236 m bsl, (3) 130 m asl, (4) 190 m asl. The Ardèche carbonate platform underwent karstification both surficial and at depth. The endokarst is characterized by numerous cavities organised in networks. Saint-Marcel Cave is one of those networks providing the most complete record (fig. 5). It opens out on the northern side of the Ardeche canyon at an altitude of 100 m. It is made up by three superposed levels extending over 45 km in length. The lower level (1) is flooded and functionnal. It extends beneath the Ardeche thalweg down to the depth of 10 m bsl reached by divers. The observations collected in the galleries lead us to the conclusion that the karst originated in the vadose area [Brunet, 2000]. The coeval base-level was necessarily below those galleries. The two other levels (middle (2) and upper (3)) are today abandoned and perched. The middle level is about 115 m asl and the upper one is about 185 m asl. They are horizontal and have morphologies specific to the phreatic and temporary phreatic zone of the karst (fig. 6). In literature, the terracing of the Saint-Marcel Cave had been systematically interpreted as the result of the lowering by steps of the Ardeche base-level [Guérin, 1973; Blanc, 1995; Gombert, 1988; Debard, 1997]. In this interpretation, each deepening phase of the base level induces the genesis of the gravitary shaft and the abandonment of the previous horizontal level. The next stillstand of base level leads to the elaboration of a new horizontal level (fig. 7). This explanation is valid for most of Quaternary karsts, that are related to glacioeustatic falls of sea-level. However our study on the Saint-Marcel Cave contests this interpretation because all the shafts show an upward digging dynamism and no hint of vadose sections. The same “per ascensum” hydrodynamism was prevailing during the development of the whole network (figs. 8 and 9). We interpret the development of the Ardeche endokarst as related to the eustatic Messinian-Pliocene cycle TB 3.4/3.5 recorded by the Rhône river. The diving investigations in the flooded part of the Saint-Marcel Cave and also in the vauclusian springs of Bourg-Saint-Andeol reached - 154 m bsl. Those depths are compatible only with the incision of the Messinian Rhône canyon at the same altitude (−236 m bsl). The Saint-Marcel lower level would have develop at that time. The ascending shaping of levels 2 and 3 is thus likely to have formed during the ensuing sea-level rise and highstand during the Pliocene, in mainly two steps: (i) the ria stage controlled by the Mediterranean sea level rise and stillstand; (ii) the rhodanian Gilbert delta progradation, that controlled the genesis of the upper level (fig. 10).


Ocean Science ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ablain ◽  
A. Cazenave ◽  
G. Larnicol ◽  
M. Balmaseda ◽  
P. Cipollini ◽  
...  

Abstract. Sea level is one of the 50 Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) listed by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) in climate change monitoring. In the past two decades, sea level has been routinely measured from space using satellite altimetry techniques. In order to address a number of important scientific questions such as "Is sea level rise accelerating?", "Can we close the sea level budget?", "What are the causes of the regional and interannual variability?", "Can we already detect the anthropogenic forcing signature and separate it from the internal/natural climate variability?", and "What are the coastal impacts of sea level rise?", the accuracy of altimetry-based sea level records at global and regional scales needs to be significantly improved. For example, the global mean and regional sea level trend uncertainty should become better than 0.3 and 0.5 mm year−1, respectively (currently 0.6 and 1–2 mm year−1). Similarly, interannual global mean sea level variations (currently uncertain to 2–3 mm) need to be monitored with better accuracy. In this paper, we present various data improvements achieved within the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) project on "Sea Level" during its first phase (2010–2013), using multi-mission satellite altimetry data over the 1993–2010 time span. In a first step, using a new processing system with dedicated algorithms and adapted data processing strategies, an improved set of sea level products has been produced. The main improvements include: reduction of orbit errors and wet/dry atmospheric correction errors, reduction of instrumental drifts and bias, intercalibration biases, intercalibration between missions and combination of the different sea level data sets, and an improvement of the reference mean sea surface. We also present preliminary independent validations of the SL_cci products, based on tide gauges comparison and a sea level budget closure approach, as well as comparisons with ocean reanalyses and climate model outputs.


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