Brief communication: Ad hoc estimation of glacier contributions to sea-level rise from the latest glaciological observations

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: Zemp, Michael, Huss, Matthias, Eckert, Nicolas, Thibert, Emmanuel, Paul, Frank, Nussbaumer, Samuel, Gärtner-Roer, Isabelle
• Other Authors: Universität Zürich Zürich (UZH), Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich), University of Fribourg, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Erosion torrentielle neige et avalanches (UR ETGR (ETNA)), Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss within Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Switzerland, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), INRAE Grenoble as part of LabEx OSUG@202, European Space Agency - European Commission : 4000109873/14/I-NB
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2020
• Subjects: [SDE]Environmental Sciences; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03125697; https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1043-2020

International audience Comprehensive assessments of global glacier mass changes based on a variety of observations and prevailing methodologies have been published at multi-annual intervals. For the years in between, the glaciological method provides annual observations of specific mass changes but is suspected to not be representative at the regional to global scales due to uneven glacier distribution with respect to the full sample. Here, we present a simple approach to estimate and correct for this bias in the glaciological sample and, hence, to provide an ad hoc estimate of global glacier mass changes and corresponding sea-level equivalents for the latest years, i.e. about - 300 +/- 250 Gt in 2016/17 and -500 +/- 200 Gt in 2017/18.