A Bottom-Up Approach for Representing the Sea Level Rise in New-Caledonia Under Changing Temperature

Abstract:

Warming temperature causes accelerated melting of world’s glacial covers, which in turn can contribute into intensified sea level rise that can endanger socio-economic activities and environmental conditions in coastal regions. This is particularly the case for small populated oceanic islands such as New Caledonia, where our statistical analysis shows significant positive trends in the Mean Annual Sea Level (MASEL) and Mean Annual Temperature (MAT), with positive dependence between these variables over the historical period of 1969 to 2018. Here, we aim at building a scenario-neutral statistical framework to represent the MASEL as a function of MAT under current and future warming conditions. We set up this framework using 24 different configurations for marginal and joint distributions with or without considering the autocorrelations and trends to address the uncertainty in assessing the risk and timing of failure in coastal infrastructures due to sea level rise under current, reduced and/or intensified rates of warmings. Our results provides a fresh framework at sea-level rise and can complement and be used in conjunction of the projections obtained by the global climate models.