NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) maintains an archive of water levels at each of its tide gauges. Transforming raw data into actionable knowledge for stakeholders hinges on data refinement and the systematic innovation of operational products. Refined data can ground-truth sea level changes and provide guidance for decision-making on navigation, marine boundaries, coastal and habitat restoration, and more. To build or enhance NOS products, there is a newly adopted emphasis on stakeholder engagement to collect, verify, and integrate technical requirements from end-users.

Recent feedback led to the integration of two standalone NOAA products into a single platform, Sea Level Trends and Extremes. In addition to streamlining and modernizing the user interface, the product will provide local and regional statistics, while also visualizing data via an interactive geospatial map. Sea Level Trends and Extremes acknowledges the influence of vertical land motion on local sea level change through map layers and regional explainers. The newly integrated site will provide NOAA’s sea level trend computations, annual exceedance probabilities, and other metrics including variability. Supporting text contains updated terminology and phrasing that effectively describes these complex statistics, which can be adopted for various outreach campaigns. For technical users, the site also provides access to Github notebooks, allowing users to customize sea level trend and extreme water level plots based on parameters such as vertical land motion. 

This oral presentation will highlight NOAA’s ability to synthesize and aggregate its tide gauge data and produce a user-friendly product that assists in community-level coastal resiliency planning. Potential users will learn about updates to authoritative sea level information and strategies for informed decision-making based on historical observations.