quarta-feira, 9 de dezembro de 2009

Tuvalu is rising?


This is a special post in English, in an otherwise Portuguese blog. Everyone got an idea today that something like Tuvalu existed somewhere. Looks like they created some hell of confusion at the Copenhagen party, and were the stars for some hours. Looks like they fear that the small island state is in danger of being swamped if sea levels rise.

Than I remembered I did a little exercise some months ago, regarding sea-level around the world. Sure, I had selected the Funafuti GLOSS station from Tuvalu. Above, in the first image, is a plot for the actual data points for each day, for the last 9 years, at that station. Please click to enlarge. The y-axis shows the sea-level, and higher values are to fear! The data used was obtained from the University of Hawaii, which has the most updated data available on the Internet.

Seems that Tuvalu is rising, though? Especially earlier this year! No, they've hided the decline, as you see in the second image, enlarged from 1993 till October, this year! But still, does someone see it rising? Why don't they tell the truth?

Edited: A reader has sent me an email stating that these are not the values anymore. He is right! The data that I got in mid-July has been corrected! Hided the decline! I'll be updating this!
Edited2: The text was edited to cope for the second image