South Pacific Sea Level Extreme Anomaly

Just read an article on a german online news website.

It´s says that the Sea Level at a part of the South Pacific - as large as Australia - has increased about 6 centimeters.
The scientists say it is like a huge hill of water that was caused by a high pressure area that is connected with the el nino.
It was researched by Caltech, they found it in the collected data from the satellite Grace.
www.agu.org...

It happened before but the water has risen 5 times higher than in every other case. They say its an "exceptional maximum" !

Here is the link to the german website:www.spiegel.de...

Please don´t 2012 this thread. thanks!

reply to post by rocket88


So, what are the implications of such an event. I know five centimeters may seem tiny, but I have the understanding that the slightest movement in the homeostasis can throw things off. Whats the deal with this event? What consequences are there?

Must be a mistranslation - high pressure would cause the sea level to fall. It's low pressure that allows it to rise - often by much more than 6cm - as we see when hurricanes make landfall, for example, or in Europe a deep low pressure system causes a tidal surge down the North Sea (as in 1953).

There is no doubt that persistant high (or low) pressure over an ocean will affect its relative level. But this has always happened since the first oceans existed.

Okay, just now read the item in GRL and this was indeed a sea level rise but it was caused by wind stress - basically strong winds around a persistent high pressure cell increasing the volume of water moving in an oceanic current.

It's also worth noting that warmer waters will be higher than colder waters dues to thermal expansion. So under a strong El Nino we would - as found - expect to see some bodies of water in the Pacific higher than usual.

Could this contribute to some of the coastal flooding in countries in that area such as Indonesia?

In late 2009 to early 2010, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite pair observed a record increase in ocean bottom pressure (OBP) over a large mid-latitude region of the South East Pacific. Its magnitude is substantially larger than other oceanic events in the Southern Hemisphere found in the entire GRACE data records (2003–2010) on multi-month time scales. The OBP data help to understand the nature of a similar signal in sea surface height (SSH) anomaly observed by altimetry: the SSH increase is mainly due to mass convergence. Analysis of the barotropic vorticity equation using scatterometer data, atmospheric reanalysis product, and GRACE and altimeter an atmospheric reanalysis product observations suggests that the observed OBP/SSH signal was primarily caused by wind stress curl associated with a strong and persistent anticyclone in late 2009 in combination with effects of planetary vorticity gradient, bottom topography, and friction.

www.agu.org...

The thing that comes to mind for me is a increased earthquake threat. Are there any fault lines in this area?

Edit to add :en.wikipedia.org...

I'm not sure exactly where the sea rise is occurring , but there is a major fault line in the south pacific.

Worth emphasising that this was all over a year ago. It's changed since then. we're now in a (declining) La Nina so sea surface heights should, if anything, be reversed.