What exactly are we talking about when we use the terms sea level rise and high tide flooding? I know that might sound pretty self-explanatory, but I wanted to hear your definitions for these two terms.

Yeah, so sea level rise is the increase in the average height of the ocean across the world's oceans compared to the land.

Along the coastline, the water level that we're observing at any particular time is influenced by a number of different factors.

So it's going to be impacted by where we are in the tidal cycle, as well as current wind conditions, storm surge, precipitation, and what the current mean sea level is.

the background, the average height of the ocean is rising.

High tide flooding is really flooding that's not associated with a storm event and so we observe it often during the highest tides of a particular year.

A lot of folks know it as king tide flooding or sunny day flooding or nuisance flooding and it's really water that's flowing into a normally dry area when we don't necessarily expect that.

What are some of the big changes in the science around sea level rise and high tide flooding from the last science report for New Hampshire? What's changed in that relatively short amount of time?