evidence: We use two different tide gauge datasets to evaluate the HCC dataset. To evaluate long-term sea level change, we use the tide gauge measurements of monthly mean sea level from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL, 2022; Holgate et al., 2013). We restrict our analysis to 663 PSMSL records of at least 20 years' length and with at least 30 % data coverage in the 1993–2012 period. To align PSMSL with HCC or HR we remove the 1993–2012 average from each of those datasets respectively. We specifically calculate the average only over all time steps where the associated observational record has valid data. This reduces the alignment error between the observations and modeled data. [...] We evaluate the performance of our dataset by comparing it to tide gauge measurements from the PSMSL database. In the "Materials and methods" section we describe in more detail how we select tide gauge measurements from PSMSL and how we align it with the HCC and HR datasets. To visualize long-term sea level change we plot the linear trend from the tide gauge records and the modeled coastal water levels respectively for years with valid observations. Our dataset reflects the different trends in different world regions well (Fig. 2a) and shows a comparable RMSE against observations. Figure 2b shows the RMSE of the monthly HCC dataset and the HR dataset against observations. Figure 2c depicts latitudes for all tide gauge stations from the PSMSL record that were used to analyze monthly water levels, aligned by ocean basins.