---
id: articles/climate-central-extreme-water-levels
about:
  label: >-
    Human-caused sea level rise drives 21st-century worldwide water level
    extremes
  description: >-
    Paper in Science Advances, led by Climate Central, estimating how much of
    the rise in extreme water levels at 519 tide gauges worldwide is due to
    human-caused sea level rise.
  tags:
    - sea level rise
    - coastal flooding
    - tide gauge
    - attribution
    - extreme water levels
article:
  tier: 2
  url: 'https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz3595'
  published: 2026-06
  publisher: Science Advances
  authors:
    - Daniel M. Gilford
    - Yucheng Lin
    - Kristina Dahl
    - Andrew J. Pershing
    - Robert E. Kopp
    - Benjamin H. Strauss
domains:
  - water
  - climate
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Human-caused sea level rise drives rapid global increase in extreme
        water levels during 21st century, new research finds
      url: 'https://climatecentral.org/press-release-sea-level-rise-global-extremes'
    - title: Published Research
      url: 'https://www.climatecentral.org/research'
  created: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed: '2026-10-19'
  reviewed_by: >-
    Claude, from the Climate Central press release and its Published Research
    list only; the Science Advances page itself did not load (bot check), so the
    abstract, methods and data availability were not read. The research list
    gives the month of publication, not the day; the press release is dated 10
    June 2026
  status: draft
---
According to the press release, 58% of the extreme water level days observed at the study's tide gauges between 2000 and 2018 are attributable to human-caused sea level rise.[^1] A human-caused signal in sea level shows up at 97% of the sites.[^1] Averaged over all sites, the count of days above the extreme threshold has nearly tripled since the 1970s.[^1,2]

The paper appeared in Science Advances in June 2026.[^2] Daniel M. Gilford of Climate Central is an author and Robert E. Kopp of Rutgers University a co-author.[^1,2] It asks what share of the growth in extreme water level days, place by place and region by region, can be put down to human-caused climate change.[^1] The press release says flood risk at the local and regional scale had not been studied this way before, leaving communities short of information.[^1]

The authors used two largely independent methods at 519 tide gauge sites, and both reach similar conclusions.[^1] The first adds up the sea level rise attributable to four contributors:

- the ocean expanding as it warms
- mountain glaciers melting
- the Greenland ice sheet losing ice
- the Antarctic ice sheet losing ice[^1]

The second compares observed sea levels from 1900 to 2018 with a modelled version of the same period without climate-warming pollution.[^1] This kind of modelled "what if" record is called a counterfactual.

A companion paper from Tulane University, "Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900", came out at the same time in Nature Climate Change.[^1] The Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH) co-supported both studies. MACH is a consortium funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Rutgers.[^1]

The paper gives site-by-site attribution of extreme water level days at hundreds of tide gauges, data of the kind a coastal flood model draws on.[^1] It also applies two attribution methods to the same question, one built from physical contributions and one from a counterfactual record.