Map shows which parts of N.J. will be underwater in the future. Look up your address.

For some in New Jersey, sea level rise is never far from the mind.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides readers an interactive tool to see what future rising temperatures could mean for melting ice and by extension rising ocean levels across the Jersey Shore and further.

“Increased carbon emissions are increasing atmospheric and ocean heating that is melting land-based ice sheets and glaciers and causing thermal expansion of the ocean resulting in coastal sea level rise along most U.S. coastlines,” William Sweet, a NOAA oceanographer, told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday.

In 2022, a report from NOAA noted that it is increasingly likely that the sea level along the nation’s coasts will rise at least 2 feet by the end of this century due to human-caused climate change.

Emissions trajectories to date, a NOAA spokesman said this week, forecast that between about 2.5 and 3.5 feet of sea level rise is likely by 2100.

The agency’s interactive tool continues to be updated to showcase the latest scenarios.

The online map from NOAA illustrates what New Jersey could expect, such as in parts of the Jersey Shore that run parallel to the Atlantic Ocean — but also places inland.

Below is a depiction of the kind of devastation 2 feet of flooding would bring to places like Tuckerton, Port Republic, Little Egg Harbor Township and Absecon.

Newly proposed regulations in New Jersey would require new structures to be built five feet higher than existing flood elevations established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.

A 5-foot rise in sea level would submerge Holly Park, Cedar Beach and much of Ocean Gate, the tool shows. In Toms River, even places some distance from the closest waterway, like Camelot and Parkway Manor, would see inundation.

Down at the Jersey Shore, towns like Margate, Ventnor and Brigantine would be immersed by rising water on both sides — from small nearby bays and the ocean.

Issues up north would be stark as well, with areas abutting the Hudson River (like Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken) facing flood issues with an increase in sea level too.

Sweet said at the local level, viewers can use NOAA’s sea level rise trajectories for 2050 and the 2100 rise scenarios from the federal sea level rise report from two years ago “together with maps to better understand what land and infrastructure will become at increasing risk to episodic flooding and more permanent inundation.”

Housing and flooding

Between 1911 to 2019, the sea level in New Jersey already rose 1.5 feet along the state’s coast — compared to half a foot in the global mean sea level, according to experts at Rutgers University.

“We’ll see faster sea level rise in the future if we continue to (release) greenhouse gas emissions,” Robert Kopp, a climate scientist and professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers, said Wednesday afternoon of the challenges ahead.

Kopp said while reducing those emissions would pay dividends late in the century and beyond, noteworthy sea level rise is already anticipated throughout the next two decades.

“That means we need to adapt to that sea level rise,” he said, while discussing the significant amount of development on the state’s coast. “When we think about things like land-use. When we think about things like infrastructure. We have to plan for sea level and the climate of future decades.”

A Rutgers analysis, provided to NJ Advance Media, also outlined the following for what potential future flooding could mean for renters and homeowners:

• Of the more than 3 million parcels of land in New Jersey as of February 2024, more than 307,000 were in the 100-year floodplain — in other words those properties that have a 1 in 100 (or 1%) chance each year of being flooded
• That 100-year scenario includes more than 224,345 residential homes at risk (of the more than 2.4 million homes)
• Parcels in New Jersey at risk under the 100-year-flood plain scenario total over $250 billion in true net assessed value — about $156 billion of which are residential homes

Sweet, at NOAA, said that New Jersey in particular also faces higher than average rates of sea level rise due to factors like the number of tropical and nor’easter storms it faces as well as “land subsidence,” the slow settling or sudden sinking of the Earth’s surface which is linked to the last ice age.

For more insights about what sea level rise could mean in your part of New Jersey, explore NOAA’s map at coast.noaa.gov/slr. You can also visit the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s sea level rise information page at https://dep.nj.gov/slr/.