The graphs at Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show progress being made on the rebel software.
It is still in alpha, but it is already rebellious because it takes gravity, axial relocation, rotational relocation, and both sea level rise (SLR) and sea level fall (SLF) into consideration (New Type of SLC Detection Model, 2, 3, 4).
It's about time that all developers of software models, who deal with the issue of sea level change (SLC). not do so perfunctorily, but rather to stop and think.
Fig. 2
I mean, stopping and thinking about the damage that the notion of "global mean sea level" can do to public conception of SLC issues.
First of all, there is no such thing as "global mean sea level," so the fewer times we use it in public the better.
The reality is that at any given time there are a plethora of sea levels around the globe, which are different from one another, and do not fit into the plain vanilla folder "global mean sea level."
II. Progress So Far
The software uses tidal gauge data, from PSMSL that has 30 or more years of recorded sea level.
These tidal gauge stations are located all around the globe.
That means 728 tide gauge stations, out of 1,417 in the PSMSL database, pass muster for use by the modelling software.
Professor Mitrovica says "only use those with 30 years or more" of tidal records, and so this software now does that.
The gist of it is that history is taken into consideration first, then at the end of that history, the future begins.
The future is added onto the end of history.
What a concept eh?
III. Other Stuff
Those who went out and bought heavy coats and industrial grade furnaces (because Oil-Qaeda operatives, like Senator Inhofe, said "an ice age is coming") will be disappointed (Global Warming Pause is a hoax; see also this).
Our current year, not to be outdone by all the other years before it, is claiming, so far, to be the year of the hottie (2015 So Far Hottest on record, NOAA).
And, for those who do not read Dredd Blog, why not read Exxon of Oil-Qaeda?
It is about an old but common theme on Dredd Blog, which is the Oil-Qaeda deceit that has been written about ad nauseam here.
IV. Back To The Software Model
Wouldn't you think it is important for your local sea port builder to know what the sea level is going to be when all the plans, permits, and bucks are put together on a project that, all things considered, takes 20-30 or so years to get ready?
The "global mean sea level" fairy tale is not sufficient for prime time sea port builders (Peak Sea Level - 2).
Lawsuits and fools galore will proliferate unless we stop that savage beast from appearing on the pages of stuff we read, and from the hearings we hold as well.
I have some good news about the new sea level rise (SLR) and sea level fall (SLF) software model.
The aggregation logic is working to combine all of the tide gauge stations in a geoZone ("aa" - "br") into two groups.
The two groups are either the SLF or SLR type, all aggregated into one of two mean seal level sub-groups.
The logic prior to this had only labelled a tide gauge station as either SLF or SLR.
Fig. 2
The model back then did no work on them, but now aggregation logic is in place, and I can graph any GeoZone on one graph, as an SLF track and an SLR track (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3).
It shows both the SLF and SLR over the years and shows SLF in red, SLR in black (Fig. 2, and Fig. 3).
Even better, I have the future projection software working with the aggregation logic, although it is not yet perfected (maybe tomorrow).
Fig. 3
Which means that the aggregation logic (after having aggregated all the historical sea level values for all tide gauge stations on the planet that are PSMSL into one array) can hand it off the the future projection logic.
Fig. 4 An "SLR only" GeoZone
The future projection logic uses that historical data, as well as the multi-value doubling logic, to project the SLR and/or SLF data out to the year 2100.
See Fig. 4, which among other things, shows where the future projection graph attaches.
It will all (historical & future) still be on one graph.
As you can only give a couple of examples today, but hang on, because some very interesting revelations are on the way.
A final note about PSMSL.
The values are in RLR millimeters, as you can see on the graphs, so read up on RLR millimeters if you haven't yet (About RLR millimeters).
Figure shows the basic idea, which is, RLR millimeters are 7000mm below global mean sea level (it is explained in the link I just gave).
As I understand it.
So in Fig. 4 there is a global mean sea level line at the 7000mm mark.
Anything above the 7000mm line is above the global mean sea level average, and anything below it is below the global mean sea level average.
Anyway, tomorrow I hope to print some graphs with the future SLF and SLR projections on it, as a continuance added to the end of the historical record.
In conclusion, I see the SLC GeoZones as a high level monitoring tool, the sub-zones SLF and SLR as closer monitoring, and when necessary, the individual tide gauge stations as the closest monitoring.
UPDATE: The SLR only scenario in GeoZone "aa" as shown in Fig. 4 is anomalous, but I have not discerend all the reasons.
But one reason is that the zone cuts off part of East Greenland, and the zone east of zone "aa" is zone "af" which does have 5 SLF stations, 1 SLR station:
So, I may have to change the zone lines to comport with the fingerprint boundaries more accurately, or something to that effect.
UPDATE 2: On closer analysis, the zone "af" stations don't resolve the problem because most of them are inactive now, and the records available for when they were active, are only for a few years:
We have all incessantly heard the McTell News stories about an invasion of, or terror attack against, the United States by al-Qaeda or ISIS.
And, regular readers of Dredd Blog have heard about the incredible odds against being killed in any such imaginary misadventure (Terrorism We Can Believe In? - 3).
Not only that, in this series Dredd Blog posts have been pointing out the real invasion
The invasion being blogged about is happening now on the East Coast as depicted in Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig. 3, which are graphs showing some of the details about the results of the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Fig. 3
On the East Coast of the U.S.eh? the sea has already penetrated the sea ports, and is intent on heading further inland.
Mature climate scientists know better than to talk about what is going to happen in "1000 years" in a paper about sea level change.
A mature scientist explains why those who speak of far off fantasy lands in the unimaginably distant future are so scientifically timid:
"I suspect the existence of what I call the `John Mercer effect'. Mercer (1978) suggested that global warming from burning of fossil fuels could lead to disastrous disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, with a sea level rise of several meters worldwide. This was during the era when global warming was beginning to get attention from the United States Department of Energy and other science agencies. I noticed that scientists who disputed Mercer, suggesting that his paper was alarmist, were treated as being more authoritative.
It was not obvious who was right on the science, but it seemed to me, and I believe to most scientists, that the scientists preaching caution and downplaying the dangers of climate change fared better in receipt of research funding. Drawing attention to the dangers of global warming may or may not have helped increase funding for relevant scientific areas, but it surely did not help individuals like Mercer who stuck their heads out. I could vouch for that from my own experience. After I published a paper (Hansen et al 1981) that described likely climate effects of fossil fuel use, the Department of Energy reversed a decision to fund our research, specifically highlighting and criticizing aspects of that paper at a workshop in Coolfont, West Virginia and in publication (MacCracken 1983). I believe there is a pressure on scientists to be conservative. Papers are accepted for publication more readily if they do not push too far and are larded with caveats. Caveats are essential to science, being born in skepticism, which is essential to the process of investigation and verification. But there is a question of degree. A tendency for `gradualism' as new evidence comes to light may be ill-suited for communication, when an issue with a short time fuse is concerned."
(The Evolution of Models - 12, quoting Dr. James Hansen). So, I am not talking about 1000 years, 1000 months, or even 500 months, away from now.
The development of sea level change (SLC) software, which projects future sea level rise (SLR) and/or sea level fall (SLF), must address three fundamental dynamics.
Dynamics that are a function of ice sheet, ice shelf, and ice cap melt (Green Facts, cf. Ice Shelf).
Each of those ice entities takes individual consideration, when software design is contemplated, even though all ice tends to begin to melt when the temperature rises above 32°F or 0°C.
A funny thing is that gravity also "melts away" as those ice entities melt, because they lose mass, which as Newton explained, is the "mother of all gravity" (The Gravity of Sea Level Change).
As shown in Fig. 1, ice caps, ice sheets, and ice shelves are all melting and/or calving, the great bulk of that melt or calving eventually flowing into the sea.
II. The Dynamics Are Not Intuitive, They Are Counter-Intuitive
The most ignored aspect of ice sheet melt and calving is that the gravitational power of the decomposing ice sheet "melts away" too.
That is one important factor that is causing SLC, but which is also melted away from our consciousness by the typical science writer's rush to "simplify" what is going on with the artificial notion of "mean sea level rise."
That SLC is not always SLR at a given latitude and longitude, no, sometimes it is SLF at that latitude and longitude, but at the same time, it is also going to be SLR at some distant latitude and longitude (New Type of SLC Detection Model - 2, On the West Side of Zero).
This phenomenon is a result of the relocation of the sea water that was once captivated by the ice sheet gravity, and held at a higher level near the coast of the land mass that ice sheet rested upon.
In Fig. 1 the dark blue area around Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica is used to show the area where SLF takes place.
The more ice that melts and flows into the sea, the more the sea level there drops.
That is because the loss of the mass of the ice sheet means the loss of power to pull the sea to the coast like a perpetual high tide.
It is like a storm tide caused by wind forcing high water against the land, but dropping that sea water back to normal levels when the wind dies down.
III. The Dynamics Are Multidimensional
Non-intuitive dynamics are not the only actions taking place at the same time.
A software developer has to also consider the fact that all three actions shown as separate concepts, with separate impacts, on SLC in Fig. 1 are potentially happening at the same time.
Add to that the fact that the ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) and ice caps, elsewhere on other land masses, melt and/or calve at different rates.
And, those rates are constantly changing.
For example, Antarctica is gaining on Greenland in terms of ice sheet mass loss by dumping ice and melt water into the seas around them (e.g. Fig. 2).
IV. The Proper Blending of the Dynamics
In the model I already developed, which is under modification to accommodate these
new dynamics of SLC (i.e. both SLR and SLF) , there is already logic to phase in Antarctica's growing contribution, as well as to diminish both Greenland's and the non-Polar Ice Cap's contributions.
See Fig. 2 where U.S. East Coast SLR (or any other global area of very high relative SLR) is shown at a very fast "two year doubling" acceleration pace; and it also shows where Antarctica (red line) becomes the prime contributor, eventually overtaking the current leading contributor, Greenland (green line).
So, I will simply add front-end logic to properly select those tide gauges, within the geographical grid zone the software model is analyzing at the time, which meet the type of SLC conditions being processed (either SLR or SLF, but not both).
Then, that one (or those several) tide gauge sites will be processed in the context of a changing contribution amount from Greenland, Antarctica, and Non-Polar areas.
Take a look at Fig. 1 again, remembering that those three scenarios are representative of what happens if all the ice at each location melts by itself, the other two having no contribution yet.
In other words, they are imaginary in the sense that the other two are very low (or zero) contributors at that specific time.
Fig. 3 SLF in Zone "aa"
They are not, however, completely imaginary because we know that the bottom scenario (the one which shows blue, meaning SLF, around Alaska) is real.
We know that because the tide gauge at Yakutat, Alaska, near Glacier Bay and shown in Fig. 3, has recorded a 700mm SLF since it became fully operational circa 1940, near a very, very large collection of glaciers that have been busy melting and calving ever since (Proof of Concept).
V. Ever Changing Fingerprint Pattern
The pattern will morph as the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets sufficiently melt and/or calve and then offset and change the Glacier Bay melt and calving pattern.
Fig. 4 SLR in zone "ak"
The result would appear as a downward SLF track that is not as steep as the Glacier Bay pattern alone.
The same logic applies to Fig. 4 which shows a tide gauge in the same geographical zone ("ak").
It is an SLR latitude and longitude location, so it must not be blurred with any of the SLF zones (to cause that blinding "mean sea level" phenomenon).
And, by the same token Fig. 4 shows that the bottom scenario in Fig. 1 is realistic for both the Yakutat tidal gauge and the San Francisco tidal gauge (blue SLF for Yakutat, cyan or yellow SLR for San Francisco).
VI. Conclusion
Gotta get back to the coding now.
The talking out loud through the keyboard now has to morph into a conversation where I am making software brain circuits.
Circuits to tell the computer how to "think" the problem through.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
Wooden Ships ...
The skeptics in the U.S., and more so the world at large, are a minority.
Since the same goes for sea level change (SLC), which is sea level rise (SLR) and/or sea level fall (SLF), today, I want to address the SLR and SLF issues in terms of the type of skepticism stemming from ignoring the latest and/or most robust science.
In doing so, I specifically address those in the scientific community, because they are a source of the ignoring, and thus they are a source of the unknowing.
Which leads to the spreading of misinformation and disinformation.
II. Sea-Level-Fingerprint Science
The science that is being ignored has been developing for well over a century:
To our knowledge, Woodward (1888) was the first to demonstrate that the rapid melting of an ice sheet would lead to a geographically variable sea level change. Woodward (1888) assumed a rigid, non-rotating Earth, and therefore self-gravitation of the surface load was the only contributor to the predicted departure from a geographically uniform (i.e. eustatic) sea level rise. This departure was large and counter-intuitive. Specifically, sea level was predicted to fall within ∼2000 km of a melting ice sheet, and to rise with progressively higher amplitude at greater distances. The physics governing this redistribution is straightforward.
Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died of septicemia, at age 47.
(What Is Pseudo Science?). Doctors and other scientific professionals emphatically rejected the reality of "germs" back then.
The science of "sea level fingerprinting" is well founded, but still not well practised or widely understood:
Rapid ice mass variations within the large polar ice sheets lead to distinct and highly non-uniform sea-level changes that have come to be known as ‘sea-level fingerprints’. We explore in detail the physics of these fingerprints by decomposing the total sea-level change into contributions from radial perturbations in the two bounding surfaces: the geoid (or sea surface) and the solid surface. In the case of a melting event, the sea-level fingerprint is characterized by a sea-level fall in the near-field of the ice complex and a gradually increasing sea-level rise (from 0.0 to 1.3 times the eustatic value) as one considers sites at progressively greater distances (up to ≈ 90° or so) from the ice sheet. The far-field redistribution is largely driven by the relaxation of the sea-surface as the gravitational pull of the ablating ice sheet weakens. The near-field sea-level fall is a consequence of both this relaxation and ocean-plus-ice unloading of the solid surface. We argue that the fingerprints provide a natural explanation for geographic variations in sea-level (e.g., tide gauge, satellite) observations. Therefore, they furnish a methodology for extending traditional analyses of these observations to estimate not only the globally averaged sea-level rate but also the individual contributions to this rate (i.e., the sources).
The science is counter-intuitive in the sense that more ice sheet melt means more SLF rather than SLR near the coast of the landmass where that melting ice sheet is located.
Nevertheless, once we get past that "mysto" reality, we have a useful tool for discerning which ice sheet is actively melting / calving, and therefore, which coasts will experience the impact of that melting and calving:
A rapidly melting ice sheet produces a distinctive geometry, or fingerprint, of sea level (SL) change. Thus, a network of SL observations may, in principle, be used to infer sources of meltwater flux. We outline a formalism, based on a modified Kalman smoother, for using tide gauge observations to estimate the individual sources of global SL change. We also report on a series of detection experiments based on synthetic SL data that explore the feasibility of extracting source information from SL records. The Kalman smoother technique iteratively calculates the maximum-likelihood estimate of Greenland ice sheet (GIS) and West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) melt at each time step, and it accommodates data gaps while also permitting the estimation of nonlinear trends. Our synthetic tests indicate that when all tide gauge records are used in the analysis, it should be possible to estimate GIS and WAIS melt rates greater than ∼0.3 and ∼0.4 mm of equivalent eustatic sea level rise per year, respectively.
The 36 zones approach, even one zone at a time, will not be focused enough for combining all, or even several tide gauge locations within one zone, and then running a future projection algorithm on that data.
(The SLR and SLF dynamics cannot be combined without creating an obscurity "e.g. mean global SLC".)
What the zone approach helps to do, however, is to group geographical locations together for an initial "zoning in."
It is sorta like the Dawn spacecraft now orbiting Ceres, moving from one distant orbit to a lower orbit, one after another (Dawn Mission Nears Ceres Orbit Maneuvers, 2).
At first Dawn was at an orbit that gave us a comprehensive view, noticing interesting phenomenon, from a maximum orbital distance.
Then as it moved closer and closer to Ceres, once various outstanding features were discovered, those features could be more intensely focused on at each lower orbit.
Fig. 2 Three Dynamics
The 36 zones (Fig. 1) allow a focus on tide gauge location records from a high orbit, as it were.
When aspects of both SLF and SLR become attention grabbers, the software solutions can focus on them individually (or collectively by selecting multiple SLR vs SLF types).
"Hey, check out this latitude and longitude, it has SLR (or SLF) that is quite out of the 'ordinary' mean sea level."
Projection software can't give a reasonable projection by combining (deriving the average of the two) a strong SLF zone with an SLR zone.
In Fig. 2 you can see that SLF areas such as Yakutat, Alaska (Proof of Concept), compared with SLR areas, such as San Francisco, CA, are distinct even though they are in the same geographical zone "ak":
SAN FRANCISCO (Lat: 37.806667, Lon: -122.464996) (1855->2014) (6954->7143) (7107,SLR) YAKUTAT (Lat: 59.548332, Lon: -139.733337) (1940->2014) (7133->6460) (6442,SLF)
They are both in the same geographical zone ("ak"), but they are very different because Yakutat is near Glacier Bay, which has been melting for a long time, creating SLF near it (7133 - 6442 = 700mm SLF).
San Francisco, on the other hand, is not near a large ice mass, so it has SLR as the Glacier Bay ice melts (7143 - 6954 = 189mm SLR).
So, the "mean average" of the beginning years (6954 + 7133) / 2 = 7043.5, and the average of the ending years (7143 + 6460) / 2 = 6801.5 (average 242mm) hides the strong SLF of Yakutat, by blurring it with the SLR of San Francisco.
Thus, what does the mean averaging of the two do, besides hiding the stark reality?
You get my drift, but it will help to watch the video below if you haven't already.
IV. Conclusion
The next phase of the software development currently ongoing is directed toward activating that approach.
Thus, I can use the same algorithms already written, however, they will not take in broad based, mixed data streams any longer.
No, they will focus on the portion of a zone that is influenced by what is taking place with particular ice sheet impacts on that particular section of the zone.
Then, those algorithms will calculate the ice sheet's expected future (e.g. rate of doubling) then go on to project the SLF and/or SLR of that one, or all of those similarly impacted tide gauge locations, within that zone.
For example, those "on the west side of zero."
Note that on the grid map of zones, "aa, ag, am, ba, bg, and bm" are on the west side of longitude zero.
Which is a lower orbit as it were, but we can get even closer, to focus on only the tide gauges separately (as subgroups) in the SLF or SLR portion of a zone.
We can better focus when we deal with subgroups that are in the fingerprint left by a particular ice sheet (note too, that some few zones are all SLR or all SLF).
That is, melt water and ice berg contribution to the sea by that ice sheet, as relocated.
Relocated by ice sheet mass / gravity loss, the overarching Earth's gravity, any axial relocation as a result of the ice sheet mass loss, the Earth's rotation, and the like.
The projection software is composed of computations that acknowledge those scientific realities.
Thus, projecting likely future SLC numbers that fit the path, which these knowing scientists have cut out of the jungle of the unknowns for us, are much more likely to be increasingly accurate (New Type of SLC Detection Model, 2).
The next post in this series is here.
Professor Jerry Mitrovica, Harvard University, comes to D.C. to 'splain:
