Sea levels along the coasts of the contiguous United States will probably rise a foot by 2050, according to a new study by NASA. The increase will be worse than previous estimates had predicted.
The rising sea levels will cause increased flooding for millions of Americans living near the coasts, NASA said. (The picture above shows a flooded road in Norfolk, Virginia.)
To determine the new predictions, NASA researchers on a Sea Level Change Team examined decades of satellite observations. They wanted to sharpen predictions for coastal communities that can be hit by both catastrophic and nuisance flooding in years ahead.
Global sea levels have been rising for decades, due to a warming climate. But the NASA team found more evidence that the rate of the increase has been accelerating. “A key takeaway is that sea level rise along the U.S. coasts has continued to accelerate over the past three decades,” said Ben Hamlington, leader of the Sea Level Change Team.
Their new findings support an interagency report last February by NASA, NOAA and the U .S. Geological Survey that said there would be a significant sea level rise in the next 30 years. For the new study, scientists as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab used 28 years of satellite images showing sea level height, and compared them with NOAA’s tide gauge records going back to 1920.
Based partially on the accelerating rate of sea level rise from 1993 to 2020, they suggest that future increases will be higher across all U.S. coastal region for the next 30 years: a 10- to 14-inch average increase for the East Coast; 14- to 18 inches on the Gulf Coast, and 4- to 8 inches on the West Coast.
NASA says that although the trends for a rise are substantially higher along the Southeast and Gulf Coasts than they are for the Northeast and West Coasts, the uncertainty factor there is also much higher, largely depending on future storms and hurricanes.
To make matters worse, the lunar cycle will cause more flooding at high tide along every U.S. coast, NASA says. A wobble in the Moon’s orbit that occurs every 18.6 years will worsen the impact of flooding during the 2030s and 2040s. Read more:
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3232/nasa-study-rising-sea-level-could-exceed-estimates-for-us-coasts/
