Conference: Understanding Projections of Sea Level Change and the Drivers

Sea level projections have impacts on coastal adaptation decision-making within the United States and around the world. Producing usable projections of future global, local and extreme sea-level change requires harmonizing and integrating information from different types of observations and models. It also requires assessing the likelihood of different outcomes under both different potential future scenarios and different sets of structural modeling assumptions. The goal of this workshop is to understand recent and ongoing progress related to projecting sea-level change and its drivers, as well as user perspectives on what has and has not worked in the use and communication of prior sea-level projections. The workshop will focus both on process understanding and on the ability to derive statistical and/or physical relationships from process understanding. The workshop will also feature discussions of prospects for future observations over the next couple of decades to reduce uncertainties in long-term projections. Early career scientists will be encouraged to participate, and mentoring opportunities will be provided. With this workshop, the American Geophysical Union aims to synthesize the current state of the science on sea level projections in a manner that builds an actionable roadmap to the next generation of integrated sea-level projections. To do so requires understanding of how models and observations are integrated, as well as assessing the probability of different outcomes under future scenarios and with different sets of assumptions. It further requires consideration of both the central distributions of likelihoods, and potential contributions from processes characterized by a lack of agreement on likelihood (and thus deep uncertainty). With these requirements in mind, this workshop will cover topics such as sterodynamic sea-level change, glaciers, land water storage, ice-sheet feedbacks and instabilities, large-scale ocean circulation changes, vertical land motion, sea-level extremes, application, and usability. The 4-day workshop will include talks, panels, posters, and breakout sessions, as well as full day for synthesis and writing the roadmap. Financial support for the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral scientists in the conference will strengthen connections among the rising generation of researchers in this area. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.