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Addressing and mitigating the effects of changes in sea level involves accurately determining the contributing factors and associated impacts to past, present and future sea-level rise and variability. Providing such a regional assessment is a challenging task that requires expertise across a wide range of disciplines and a variety of data sources. On the basis of satellite altimetry measurements over the past two decades, regional sea-level trends can be as much as four times the rate of global mean sea level (GMSL; Fig. 1a, note the GMSL trend of ~3 mm yr⁻¹ is removed from the figure). This severely limits the utility of any global sea-level metric for planning and adaptation purposes at the regional level. In some regions, internal climate variability on decadal timescales can lead to apparent trends that are significantly larger than the long-term trend. Identifying and explaining signals contributing to regional and global sea-level variability and trends have been frequently studied problems in recent years (for example, refs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Removing trends associated with known climate variability may allow for identification of the underlying warming trend associated with anthropogenic forcing (for example, refs 3, 6, 7, 8).

a–c, Sea-level trends (mm yr⁻¹) from 1993 to 2010 for Archiving, Validation and Interpretation of Satellite Oceanographic (AVISO) data (a), Hamlington et al.⁶ PDO contribution estimated by empirical orthogonal function analysis of sea-level reconstruction (b), and AVISO minus the PDO contribution (c). Note, the global mean sea-level trend has been removed from the AVISO data.

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