Update on Global Sea Levels
I found this site, run by the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center which shows recent sea level deviations at certain locations across the world compared to the 1993-1995 mean. Not all of the locations are up and running, but if you click on one that is it will show you the sea level height anomaly trend going back 10, 20, 25 years back or so, depending on when the site was initially started up and running. I have seen a lot of conflicting opinions on the comment section of this blog in regards to this subject.
As you can see, the deviations are quite variable. Most of the higher sea levels compared to the 1993-1995 mean were located in the western Pacific, western Atlantic and around Australia. The lower deviations were concentrated off of Scandinavia and the west coast of North America.
The cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been at least partly responsible for the warming of surface waters over the northwestern/western Pacific. The warmer waters have caused a thermal expansion of the water and a resulting sea level rise. How much of the rise is due to that? I do not know. Here is a link to the latest global sea surface temperature anomalies.
A previous report in June from ScienceDaily suggested that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961-2003 were 50% larger than estimated in the 2007 IPCC report. Sea levels rose by 1.5 mm per year from 1961-2003 or a total of 2.5 inches in during the 42-year span.
