The Progress and Prospect of Sea Level Observing System and Data Product Development

Rising sea levels are global threats because they have huge impacts on human living environment and life safety.The development of sea level observing system and follow-up data products are particularly important to the analysis of global and regional sea level change, drivers of long-term sea level change and future trend. The global sea level observing system(GLOSS), as a relatively mature international sea level monitoring program, has been designed to provide data products for global/regional sea level observations and analyses. Meanwhile, the State Oceanic Administration of China is also actively promoting the establishment and strengthening of satellite altimetry and tide station networks, and has released multiple sea level data products. However, the domestic climate monitoring mainly depends on the annual coastal sea level anomaly series provided by the National Marine Information Center. Hence it is necessary to reinforce data collection, evaluation, product processing and operational application of the multi-source sea level observations so as to further enhance the supporting capacity of marine climate monitoring data and elaborate the application of sea level observation data in marine disaster assessment and climate change response. Moreover, the comparative analysis and fusion of sea level data from tide station and satellite observations deserve more attention, based on which it is feasible to construct self-renewable global/regional sea-level time series.