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

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: M. Zemp, M. Huss, N. Eckert, E. Thibert, F. Paul, S. U. Nussbaumer, I. Gärtner-Roer
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Geology; QE1-996.5; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1043-2020; https://doaj.org/article/6ee24b2368d34999826e5a826c3a4640

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 <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">300</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">250</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="58pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="cc3d2c1df6df32c1c6bc7a6f5a8b3f63"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="tc-14-1043-2020-ie00001.svg" width="58pt" height="10pt" src="tc-14-1043-2020-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg> Gt in 2016/17 and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">500</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">200</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="58pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="19916367d9a16b6e4968e2f9b0f598a4"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="tc-14-1043-2020-ie00002.svg" width="58pt" height="10pt" src="tc-14-1043-2020-ie00002.png"/></svg:svg> Gt in 2017/18.