Global Ocean Mean Sea Level time series and trend from Observations Reprocessing

The ocean monitoring indicator on mean sea level is derived from the DUACS delayed-time (DT-2021 version, “my” (multi-year) dataset used when available, “myint” (multi-year interim) used after) sea level anomaly maps from satellite altimetry based on a stable number of altimeters (two) in the satellite constellation. These products are distributed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service and are also available in the Copernicus Marine Service catalogue (SEALEVEL_GLO_PHY_CLIMATE_L4_MY_008_057). The mean sea level evolution estimated in the global ocean (hereafter GMSL) is derived from the average of the gridded sea level maps weighted by the cosine of the latitude. The annual and semi-annual periodic signals are removed (least scare fit of sinusoidal function) and the time series is low-pass filtered (175 days cut-off). The time series is corrected for the effect of the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment using the ICE5G-VM2 GIA model (Peltier, 2004) to consider the ongoing movement of land due to post-glacial rebound. During 1993-1998, the GMSL has been known to be affected by a TOPEX-A instrumental drift (WCRP Global Sea Level Budget Group, 2018; Legeais et al., 2020). This drift led to overestimate the trend of the GMSL during the first 6 years of the altimetry record. Accounting for this correction changes the shape of the time series, which is no more linear but quadratic, indicating mean sea level acceleration during the altimetry era. The trend uncertainty of 0.3 mm/yr is provided at 90% confidence interval (Guérou et al., 2022). This estimate only considers errors related to the altimeter observation system (i.e., orbit determination errors, geophysical correction errors and inter-mission bias correction errors). The presence of the interannual signal can strongly influence the trend estimation depending on the period considered (Wang et al., 2021; Cazenave et al., 2014). The uncertainty linked to this effect is not considered.