Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise

Here, we present a 20‐year record of monthly ice sheet mass balance for Greenland and Antarctica. We examine and reconcile two independent methods for estimating temporal variations in ice sheet mass balance, the mass budget method (MB) and the gravity method, during the last 8 years. The MBM compares the surface mass balance (SMB; i.e., the sum of snowfall minus surface ablation) reconstructed from regional atmospheric models with perimeter loss (D; ice discharge) calculated from a time series of glacier velocity and ice thickness to deduce the rate of mass change, dM/dt [Rignot and Kanagaratnam, 2006; Howat et al., 2007; Rignot et al., 2008a; van den Broeke et al., 2009]. The gravity method employs a monthly…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• CI
  California Institute of Technology
• UU
  Universiteit Utrecht
• JP
  Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• UO
  University of California, Irvine