Abstract
How Has Extreme Sea Level in Coastal Regions Changed Over Time? Quantifying Their Long-term Trends with Changepoint Detection
Sea level rise can bring disastrous outcomes to people living in coastal regions by increasing flood risk or inducing stronger storm surges. We study long-term linear trends in monthly maximum sea levels by applying extreme value methods. The monthly maximum sea levels are extracted from multiple tide gauges around the coastal regions of the world over a period of as long as 169 years. Due to instrument changes, location changes, earthquakes, land reclamation, dredging, etc., the sea level data could contain inhomogeneous shifts in their means, which can substantially impact trend estimates if ignored. To rigorously quantify the long-term linear trends and return levels for the monthly maximum sea level data, we use a genetic algorithm to estimate the number and times of changepoints in the data. We find that the consideration of changepoints changed the estimated linear trends of 89 tide gauges (approximately 30% of tide gauges considered) by more than 20 cm per century.