Abstract
Abstract. 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.
Highlights
More than 215 000 glaciers – distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets – cover an area of about 700 000 km2 (RGI, 2017) with a recently re-estimated total volume of about 160 000 km3 (Farinotti et al, 2019)
In the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, the glaciological community has periodically published observational estimates of glacier contributions to sea-level rise based on coordinated efforts making use of all available data at that time: Meier (1984) and Trupin et al (1992) in IPCC TAR (2001); Kaser et al (2006) based on Cogley (2005), Dyurgerov and Meier (2005), and Ohmura (2004) in IPCC AR4 (2007); Gardner et al (2013) mainly based on Cogley (2009) in IPCC AR5 (2013)
These approaches were challenged by small observational samples covering no more than a few hundred glaciers, with an uneven spatial and temporal distribution (Zemp et al, 2015) and were complemented for IPCC AR5 by estimates from spaceborne altimetry and gravimetry (Gardner et al, 2013)
Summary
More than 215 000 glaciers – distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets – cover an area of about 700 000 km (RGI, 2017) with a recently re-estimated total volume of about 160 000 km (Farinotti et al, 2019). In the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, the glaciological community has periodically published observational estimates of glacier contributions to sea-level rise based on coordinated efforts making use of all available data at that time: Meier (1984) and Trupin et al (1992) in IPCC TAR (2001); Kaser et al (2006) based on Cogley (2005), Dyurgerov and Meier (2005), and Ohmura (2004) in IPCC AR4 (2007); Gardner et al (2013) mainly based on Cogley (2009) in IPCC AR5 (2013) These approaches were challenged by small observational samples covering no more than a few hundred glaciers, with an uneven spatial and temporal distribution (Zemp et al, 2015) and were complemented for IPCC AR5 by estimates from spaceborne altimetry and gravimetry (Gardner et al, 2013). We discuss the regional biases of the glaciological sample and conclude with a brief outlook on possible applications and remaining limitations of the glaciological observation network of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS)
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