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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
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:
geo
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1043-2020
https://www.the-cryosphere.net/14/1043/2020/tc-14-1043-2020.pdf
https://doaj.org/article/6ee24b2368d34999826e5a826c3a4640
Description
Summary: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.