Sea levels in Karnataka’s Mangaluru are likely to rise more than they will in Mumbai or New York because of melting of glaciers, data from the United States’ National Aeronautical and Space Administration analysed by the Hindustan Times showed.

A new forecasting tool, developed by Nasa scientists, called Gradient Fingerprint Mapping, helps predict the effect of rising sea levels on 293 port cities. The tool looks at the Earth’s spin and gravitational effects to predict how the sea water will be redistributed across regions.

Mangaluru will see a higher local sea level rise – 1.598 mm – than Mumbai – 1.526 mm – for the same level of glacial melting across all basins, the analysis showed. The tool shows the contribution of each glacial basis to the rise in sea level for each city.

“This [tool] provides, for each city, a picture of which glaciers, ice sheets, and ice caps are of specific importance,” researchers told BBC, after their study was published by Science Advances.

Scientist Erik Ivins said, “As cities and countries attempt to build plans to mitigate flooding, they have to be thinking about 100 years in the future and they want to assess risk in the same way that insurance companies do.”