Abstract
Recent studies show a “hotspot of accelerated sea level rise” along the U.S. East Coast, where sea level is rising much faster than global rates and flooding is increasing. Various aspects of sea level rise will be discussed: past observations, future projections, and the impact on increased coastal flooding. Somewhat new aspect of sea level rise is the impact from climatic changes in ocean circulation, in particular, potential weakening of the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may cause an uneven coastal sea level rise. The difficulty of detecting acceleration in sea level rise rates from tide gauge records and the usage of new statistical methods to analyze these data will be demonstrated with data from North American and European coasts.

Speaker
Tal Ezer
Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA

About the speaker
Dr. Ezer received B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics and M.Sc. in Atmospheric Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. After a few years at Israel’s National Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute, he moved to the US and obtained in 1989 a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from Florida State University. Dr. Ezer spent 18 years as a Research Scholar at Princeton University, before joining Old Dominion University in 2007, where he is now a Professor of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and part of ODU’s Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Initiative. For the past 20 years Ezer has managed the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) users group of some 5000 users from 70 countries.
([email protected]; http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/Facstaff/faculty/tezer/ezer.html)