Image: NASA 2012
Rare event related to the El Niño cycle and global hydrology is happening again.
In 2011, rains fell so intensely across Australia and South America that ocean levels actually fell temporarily, as massive amounts of water moved from ocean onto land.
Science Daily November 19, 2012:
In August 2011, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Colorado in Boulder reported that global sea level rise had hit a speed bump.
The researchers found that between early 2010 and summer 2011, global sea level fell sharply, by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter. Using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft, they showed that the drop was caused by the very strong La Niña that began in late 2010. This periodic Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon changed rainfall patterns all over our planet, moving huge amounts of Earth’s water from the ocean to the continents, primarily to Australia, northern South America and Southeast Asia.
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It might be happening again.
Meteorologist Ryan Hall flagged this on his YouTube channel.
Be aware.
Sea level data sets are traditionally noisy, and climate deniers frequently have used that noise to fog or confuse what is a consistent story of physics.
There was research that calculated how much sea level rise was mitigated by the amount of water being held back by dams around the world. The conclusion, however, was that adding more dams wouldn’t help much because all of the best dammable sites were taken, and the cost/benefit was too high to make it worthwhile.
I was surprised by the author’s claim that sea level dropped due to excessive rain. On top of that, the 2012 chart showing “a 3.2 mm rise per year trend line” is a little out of date considering that recent measurements (via satellite radar) indicate that the current rate-of-rise is closer to “4.6 mm per year”. [[[ which translates to 18 inches per century if the rate-of-rise remains constant ]]]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
Sea level dropped temporarily.
Once thermal expansion starts to dominate over land ice melt, I think that these massive atmospheric water events will have less impact on sea level.