Anny Cazenave (CNES/LEGOS, France); Alejandro Blazquez (CNES/LEGOS, France)

Over the last 4 years, we have worked on the improvement of the sea level record at annual to multidecadal time scales. Important achievements of this work have been the development of a correction for the Topex-Poseidon drift and the estimation of uncertainties in the global mean sea level estimate derived from satellite altimetry. On the basis of these results we have been able to close the sea level budget within error bars with an unprecedented accuracy. We further used this precise closure of the sea level budget to estimate the global ocean heat content and derive an estimate of the Earth energy imbalance that is responsible for climate change. Another salient result of our work is the estimation for the first time of sea level trends at less than 10km from the coast using satellite altimeters. This estimation shows that in most regions of the world the multidecadal coastal sea level trend is not significantly different from the multidecadal regional sea level trend at 25km from the coast.