Articles | Volume 14, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1043-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1043-2020
Brief communication
 | 
20 Mar 2020
Brief communication |  | 20 Mar 2020

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

Michael Zemp, Matthias Huss, Nicolas Eckert, Emmanuel Thibert, Frank Paul, Samuel U. Nussbaumer, and Isabelle Gärtner-Roer

Data sets

Glaciological mass-balance data from World Glacier Monitoring Service WGMS: Fluctuations of Glaciers Database, World Glacier Monitoring Service, digital media, doi:10.5804/wgms-fog-2019-12, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5904/wgms-fog-2019-12

Global glacier mass changes from 1961 to 2016 Zemp, M., Huss, M., Thibert, E., Eckert, N., McNabb, R., Huber, J., Barandun, M., Machguth, H., Nussbaumer, S. U., Gärtner-Roer, I., Thomson, L., Paul, F., Maussion, F., Kutuzov, S. and Cogley, J. G.: Global glacier mass changes and their contributions to sea-level rise from 1961 to 2016, Nature, 568(7752), 382–386, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1071-0, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3557199

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Short summary
Comprehensive assessments of global glacier mass changes have been published at multi-annual intervals, typically in IPCC reports. For the years in between, we present an approach to infer timely but preliminary estimates of global-scale glacier mass changes from glaciological observations. These ad hoc estimates for 2017/18 indicate that annual glacier contributions to sea-level rise exceeded 1 mm sea-level equivalent, which corresponds to more than a quarter of the currently observed rise.