
144 Engineering Response to Climate Change
In addition to the unknown trends in the future climate behavior, gaps in
the data and the fact that identication of the mean trend is not independent
of the method of estimation increase the ambiguity in sea level prediction.
SLR has been commonly treated as a linear trend over the historical data set.
In his analysis of data from four tide gages in Florida, Walton (2007) allowed
for acceleration (or deceleration) in SLR and showed that this resulted in a
greater predicted (2006–2080) rise than forecasted by the linear trend assump-
tion. Figure 4.3 shows the mean monthly relative sea level from October ...