Presenter: Fabrizio Falasca (NYU)

Description:
As the global mean sea level continues to rise due to anthropogenic climate change, regional sea levels extremes are changing in a more complex fashion. Indeed, changes in regional sea level distributions, driven by both internal variability and climate change, cannot be quantified by changes in mean and variance alone. Here, we focus on daily-resolved Tide Gauges records along the U.S. Atlantic coast and quantify trends in daily sea level through quantile regression. Quantile regression allows for assessing trends in all percentiles, thus quantifying changes in the full sea level distribution rather than just the mean response. We show that independent of the Tide Gauges, the 5th, 50th and 95th percentiles are characterized by positive, linear trends. However, dependent on the location, shifts in the upper and lower tails differ significantly from trends in the median, indicating more complex distributional changes such as larger skewness and kurtosis in recent years. We present an in-depth assessment of how these distributional changes vary along the coast and throughout different seasons. The analysis is a step towards a comprehensive characterization of local extreme sea level changes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, with implications for a further understanding of coastal dynamics, climate model evaluation and risk assessment.