Julius Oelsmann

Julius Oelsmann is a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering at the School of Science and Engineering, Tulane University, since January 2025. He holds a doctoral degree in Geodesy and Oceanography from the Deutsches Geodätisches Forschungsinstitut at the Technical University of Munich and a master’s degree from the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on disentangling the individual components of regional coastal sea-level change. In addition to climate-induced sea-level rise, a significant portion of relative sea-level change at the coast results from vertical land motion, including subsidence and uplift driven by various geophysical processes. To quantify these contributions, he integrates multiple observational techniques—including coastal altimetry, tide gauges, GNSS, and InSAR—with models of ocean and solid Earth dynamics. Using these constraints, he develops and applies statistical frameworks to assess the drivers and impacts of past and future sea-level changes.

Selected Awards and Recognitions

2022  Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award (EGU 2022) for the presentation entitled 'The impact of continuous space and time-resolving vertical land motion on relative sea level change' in the session Climate: Past, Present & Future

Recent Service Roles

Co-convener: Understanding sea level changes: global to local, from past to future, 2023, EGU23, Vienna, Austria
Convener: Coastal Altimetry Workshop, 2023, Cadiz, Spain

Teaching

Contributions to teaching the ‘Sea-Level Change’ course at Tulane
Contributions to teaching the ‘Oceanography and Satellite Altimetry’ course at TUM
Organisation of Summer school on Earth System Modeling (EaSyMS Summer School), Hamburg, 2018

Selected Publications

Oelsmann, J., Calafat, F. M., Passaro, M., Hughes, C., Richter, K., Piecuch, C., et al. (2024). Coherent modes of global coastal sea level variability. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 129, e2024JC021120. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JC021120

Wise, A., Calafat, F. M., Hughes, C. W., Jevrejeva, S., Katsman, C. A., Oelsmann, J., et al. (2024). Using shelf-edge transport composition and sensitivity experiments to understand processes driving sea level on the Northwest European shelf. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 129, e2023JC020587. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JC020587

Oelsmann, J., Nicholls R., Lincke D., Marcos, M., Sánchez, L., Dettmering, D., Hinkel J., and Seitz,F. (2024): Coastal populations experience sea level rise twice as large as the global average, preprint: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3498360/v1, submitted at PNAS

Treu, S., Muis, S., Dangendorf, S., Wahl, T., Oelsmann, J., Heinicke, S., Frieler, K., and Mengel, M.: Reconstruction of hourly coastal water levels and counterfactuals without sea level rise for impact attribution, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-112, accepted 2023.

Cazenave A. and the Climate Change Initiative Coastal Sea Level Team, Sea level along the world’s coastlines can be measured by a network of virtual altimetry stations, Nature Communications, Earth & Environment,3, 117, 10.1038/s43247-022-00448-z2022, 2022
Oelsmann, J., Marcos, M., Passaro, M. et al. Regional variations in relative sea-level changes influenced by nonlinear vertical land motion. Nat. Geosci. 17, 137–144 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01357-2

Oelsmann J., Passaro M., Sánchez L., Dettmering D., Schwatke C., and Seitz F. (2022). Bayesian modelling of piecewise trends and discontinuities to improve the estimation of coastal vertical land motion. Journal of Geodesy, 96(62), DOI: 10.1007/s00190-022-01645-6.

Oelsmann J., Passaro M., Dettmering D., Schwatke C., Sánchez L., Seitz F.: The zone of influence: matching sea level variability from coastal altimetry and tide gauges for vertical land motion estimation. Ocean Science, 17(1), 35--57, 10.5194/os-17-35-2021, 2021

Passaro M., Müller F.L., Oelsmann J., Rautiainen L., Dettmering D., Hart-Davis M.G., Abulaitijiang A., Andersen O.B., Høyer J., Madsen K., Ringgaard I., Särkkä J., Scarrott R., Schwatke C., Seitz F., Tuomi L., Restano M., Benveniste J.: Absolute Baltic Sea Level Trends in the Satellite Altimetry Era: A Revisit. Frontiers in Marine Science, 8, 10.3389/fmars.2021.647607, 2021

Oelsmann, J., Borchert, L., Hand, R., Baehr, J., & Jungclaus, J. H. (2020). Linking ocean forcing and atmospheric interactions to Atlantic multidecadal variability in MPI‐ESM1.2. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL087259. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL087259