Present-to-future sea level changes: The Australian case

We revisit available tide gauge data along the coasts ofAustralia, and we are able to demonstrate that the rate may vary between 0.1 and 1.5 mm/ year, and that there is an absence of acceleration over the last decades. With a database of 16 stations coveringonlythe last 17 years,theNational TidalCentre claimsthatsea levelisrising at a rate of5.4mm/year.We here analyse partly longer-termrecordsfromthe same 16 sites asthose used by theAustralianBaselineSeaLevelMonitoringProject(ABSLMP) andpartly 70 othersites; i.e. a database of 86 stations covering a much longer time period. This database gives a mean trend in the order of 1.5 mm/year. Therefore, we challenge both the rate of sea level rise presented by the National Tidal Centre in Australia and the general claim of acceleration over the last decades