Climate change: Sea level rise to affect 'three times more people'

[muriel_volestrangler]

That's the conclusion of new research conducted by Climate Central, a US-based non-profit news organisation.

It finds that 190 million people will be living in areas that are projected to be below high-tide lines come 2100.
...
Climate Central's investigations, published in the journal Nature Communications, have sought to correct the biases in the elevation datasets previously used to work out how far inland coastlines will be inundated.
...
This problem occurs particularly in locations where there is thick vegetation, such as forests; the radar tends to see the tree canopy, not the ground.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50236882

New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding

Most estimates of global mean sea-level rise this century fall below 2?m. This quantity is comparable to the positive vertical bias of the principle digital elevation model (DEM) used to assess global and national population exposures to extreme coastal water levels, NASA’s SRTM. CoastalDEM is a new DEM utilizing neural networks to reduce SRTM error. Here we show – employing CoastalDEM—that 190?M people (150–250?M, 90% CI) currently occupy global land below projected high tide lines for 2100 under low carbon emissions, up from 110?M today, for a median increase of 80?M. These figures triple SRTM-based values. Under high emissions, CoastalDEM indicates up to 630?M people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340?M for mid-century, versus roughly 250?M at present. We estimate one billion people now occupy land less than 10?m above current high tide lines, including 250?M below 1?m.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z

There's an interactive map at https://coastal.climatecentral.org , but the overlays of old/new estimates don't always appear. I don't know if that's because of load on the server or what.

[Boomer]

1. Early morning news report

As one of the researchers explained, 1st world countries like the U.S. have used lasers to determine ground height and they are fairly accurate. What is changing are estimates for many Asian countries that used less accurate technology.