A U.S. researcher says global warming is expected to cause the sea level along the northeastern U.S. coast to rise nearly twice as fast as global sea levels.

And that, said Jianjun Yin, a climate modeler at the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, puts New York City at greater risk for damage from hurricanes and winter storm surges.

Yin said he has determined there is a better than 90 percent chance the sea level rise along the heavily populated northeastern U.S. coast will exceed the mean global sea level rise by the year 2100 by as much as 18 inches or more. That can be attributed to thermal expansion and the slowing of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation because of warmer ocean surface temperatures.

Yin and colleagues Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois and Ronald Stouffer of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University say they analyzed data from 10 state-of-the-art climate models that have been used for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report.

The research is reported in the online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.