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Climate chronicles

Sea level rise in 2024

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 6, pages 246–248 (2025)Cite this article

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Global sea level rose 0.59 cm in 2024 relative to 2023, reaching a total increase of 10.5 cm over the 31-year satellite record of sea level. Regionally, over 40% of the ocean reached its highest annual sea level value in 2024.

Key points

  • Global sea level increased more than expected owing to exceptional ocean warming, which contributed over 70% of the observed 0.59 cm.

  • Regionally, a shift from El Niño conditions in the early part of 2024 to more neutral conditions led to sea level decreases in the equatorial and tropical Pacific.

  • A positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole extended from 2023 into 2024, leading to exceptionally high sea level rise in parts of the Indian Ocean in 2024.

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Fig. 1: Sea level characteristics in 2024.

Data availability

The sea surface height anomaly data, provided by NASA’s MEaSUREs program, is available through the NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). The dataset includes globally gridded altimetry-based sea surface height anomalies derived from multiple satellite missions: https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/NASA_SSH_REF_SIMPLE_GRID_V1. The NOAA Global Ocean Heat and Salt Content Dataset provides time series and anomaly fields for global ocean heat and salt content based on in situ observations: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/global-ocean-heat-content/fsl_global.html. GRACE and GRACE Follow-On Release 06M version 2 (RL06Mv2) data are available from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This dataset provides updated time-variable gravity field solutions for monitoring Earth’s mass changes: GRACE and GRACE-FO JPL RL06Mv2 Data.

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Acknowledgements

This article was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. B.D.H. and P.R.T. acknowledge support from the NASA Sea Level Change Team.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Benjamin D. Hamlington & Severine Fournier

  2. School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Philip R. Thompson

  3. IMEDEA (UIB-CSIC), Esporles, Spain and International Space Science Institute, Bern, Switzerland

    Marta Marcos

Authors
  1. Benjamin D. Hamlington
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  2. Severine Fournier
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  3. Philip R. Thompson
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  4. Marta Marcos
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Correspondence to Benjamin D. Hamlington.

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Hamlington, B.D., Fournier, S., Thompson, P.R. et al. Sea level rise in 2024. Nat Rev Earth Environ 6, 246–248 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00667-w

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