76cm from 2022 to 2023 — nearly four times the increase of the previous year — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on Thursday , attributing the"significant jump" to a strong El Nino and a warming climate.The Nasa logo is displayed at the Earth Information Center exhibit, at Nasa headquarters in Washington, DC, on June 21, 2023.
The Nasa-led analysis is based on more than 30 years of satellite observations, with the initial satellite launching in 1992 and the latest in 2020. "Current rates of acceleration mean that we are on track to add another 20cm of global mean sea level by 2050," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, director of the Nasa sea level change team and the ocean physics program in Washington.
The immediate cause of the spike is the El Nino weather effect, which replaced the La Nina from 2021 to 2022, when the sea level rose around 0.2cm."In El Nino years, a lot of the rain that normally falls on land ends up in the ocean, which raises sea levels temporarily," said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory .