Asymmetry in pattern of recent sea level change

The world's oceans are connected, but they rise at different rates. Image courtesy of Philip R. Thompson and Mark A. Merrifield, SOEST.

The oceans aren’t level. Over the span of decades, atmospheric weather patterns push water around, causing sea levels in connected ocean basins to rise and fall somewhat predictably. However, since 2000 the two huge basins in the Southern Hemisphere — the Indian and the Pacific —  have broken their trend, rising jointly over 2 mm per year. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters by Philip Thompson, associate director of the UH Sea Level Center (UHSLC), and Mark Merrifield, director of UHSLC and the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR), proposes that this new development, found using satellite-derived sea height data, could be due to changes in a large climate system that wraps around the entire Southern Hemisphere.

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