A scalable Bayesian framework for modern sea-level inference

Abstract

This paper presents a scalable Bayesian framework for the inference of modern-day sea-level change and surface mass redistribution. To motivate this approach, we first review and quantify the performance of some standard methods for the analysis of satellite gravity and ocean altimetry observations. We find that these methods substantially underestimate uncertainties and are subject to systematic biases, deficiencies that stem from their incomplete treatment of sea-level physics and from uncertainty estimates based solely on the propagation of observational noise. To address these limitations, our approach combines three advances. First, we use recent developments in adjoint sea-level theory to embed the full physics into the forward and inverse modelling. Second, we formulate the Bayesian inverse problem in an infinite-dimensional setting, thereby avoiding discretisation artefacts and the underestimation of uncertainties inherent in truncated model spaces. Finally, our computational methods render such inversions tractable at full observational resolution while supporting joint model spaces and multiple data types. By employing a matrix-free approach with iterative solvers and randomised low-rank decompositions -- implemented in the linked open-source libraries pygeoinf and pyslfp -- basic calculations are possible on a single laptop, with the most intensive tasks parallelising trivially across available cores. We demonstrate the methodology through a series of synthetic experiments, culminating in a joint inversion of satellite gravity and ocean altimetry data that decomposes regionally averaged sea-level change into steric and manometric components with quantified uncertainties, including the degeneracies that remain.