Sea Level Rise and Decadal Variations in the Ligurian Sea Inferred from the Medimaremetre Measurements.

Abstract:

Estimations of sea level rise over the last centuries are mostly based on the rare historical sea level records from tide gauge stations usually designed for navigational purposes. In this study, we examine the quality of sea level measurements performed by a mean sea level gauge operated in Nice from 1887 to 1909 and transferred to the nearby town of Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1913 where it stayed in operation untill 1974. The mean sea level gauges, called medimaremetres, were invented for geodetic studies and installed in many French ports since the end of the XIX century. By construction, the medimaremetre was connected to the sea through a porous porcelain crucible in order to filter out the tides and higher frequency sea level oscillations. Ucontrolled properties of the crucible and some systematic errors made the medimaremetre data to be ignored in the current sea level researches. We demonstrate that the Nice-Villefranche medimaremetre measurements are coherent with two available historical tide gauge records from Marseille and Genova and a new century-scale sea level series can be build up by combining the medimaremetre data with the those recorded by a tide gauge operating in Nice since the 1980s. We analyse the low frequency variabilities in Marseille, Nice-Villefranche and Genova and get new insights on the decadal sea level variations in the Ligurian Sea since the end of the XIX century.