A decade of sea level rise slowed by climate-driven hydrology

J T Reager; A S Gardner; J S Famiglietti; D N Wiese; A Eicker; M-H Lo

doi:10.1126/science.aad8386

A decade of sea level rise slowed by climate-driven hydrology

Science. 2016 Feb 12;351(6274):699-703. doi: 10.1126/science.aad8386.

Authors

J T Reager¹, A S Gardner², J S Famiglietti³, D N Wiese², A Eicker⁴, M-H Lo⁵

Affiliations

¹ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, CA, USA. john.reager@jpl.nasa.gov.
² Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, CA, USA.
³ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, CA, USA. Department of Earth System Science, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
⁴ Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
⁵ Department of Atmospheric Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

PMID: 26912856
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad8386

Abstract

Climate-driven changes in land water storage and their contributions to sea level rise have been absent from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sea level budgets owing to observational challenges. Recent advances in satellite measurement of time-variable gravity combined with reconciled global glacier loss estimates enable a disaggregation of continental land mass changes and a quantification of this term. We found that between 2002 and 2014, climate variability resulted in an additional 3200 ± 900 gigatons of water being stored on land. This gain partially offset water losses from ice sheets, glaciers, and groundwater pumping, slowing the rate of sea level rise by 0.71 ± 0.20 millimeters per year. These findings highlight the importance of climate-driven changes in hydrology when assigning attribution to decadal changes in sea level.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.