Elizabeth Bradshaw (British Oceanographic Data Centre, United Kingdom); Kathy Gordon (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom); Angela Hibbert (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom); Svetlana Jevrejeva (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom); Lesley Rickards (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom); Simon Williams (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom); Philip Woodworth (Permanent Survey for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom)

The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) provides an internationally recognised focus for knowledge and expertise on sea level science, and constructs and maintains a global data set of long term sea level change information from tide gauges. The PSMSL was established as a “Permanent Service” of the International Council for Science in 1958, but in practice was a continuation of the Mean Sea Level Committee which had been set up at the Lisbon International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) conference in 1933. Today, the PSMSL operates under the auspices of the International Council for Science (ICSU), is a regular member of the ICSU World Data System, and is based in Liverpool at the National Oceanography Centre.

The PSMSL data bank holds over 67,500 station-years of monthly and annual mean sea level data from over 2300 tide gauge stations. Data from each site are quality controlled and, wherever possible, reduced to a common datum, whose stability is monitored through a network of geodetic benchmarks. All data is freely available from the PSMSL website, and has been used in a wide range of disciplines, including oceanography, geology, geodesy and climate change studies. PSMSL data has played a central part in the IPCC assessments of sea level rise and has been the core component in reconstructions of global sea level over the past hundred years.

Here we will present an overview of the PSMSL dataset, how it can be obtained and used, and highlight some of the tools we have created to enable users to explore our dataset. We will describe how the global tide gauge network has evolved over the past 200 years and examine its current state. We will also discuss our ongoing work with SONEL to exchange information about geodetic links between tide gauges and GNSS receivers, allowing us to link relative sea level measured at tide gauges to the reference ellipsoid.