Work

Annual mass change of the world's glaciers from 1976 to 2024 by temporal downscaling of satellite data with in situ observations

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: . Glaciers, distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, play a crucial role in Earth's climate system by affecting global sea levels, freshwater availability, nutrient and energy budgets and regional climate patterns. Accurate measurements of glacier mass changes are needed to understand and project glacier evolution and its related impacts on the climate system. Two distinct methods allow to measure glacier mass changes at high spatial resolution. Remotely sensed surface elevation data provides volume change estimates over large glacierized regions for multi-annual to decadal time periods. Field glaciological measurements provide annually to seasonally resolved information on glacier mass change for a small sample of the world’s glaciers. By combining the two methods we provide annual time series of individual glacier mass changes and related uncertainties spanning the hydrological years from 1976 to 2023. The per-glacier time series can then be seamlessly integrated into annually resolved global regular grids of glacier mass changes at user-specified spatial resolution. Our results undergo a leave-one-out cross-validation confirming uncertainty estimates at the glacier level to be in the conservative side. Our dataset provides a new baseline for future glacier change modelling assessments and their impact on the world's energy, water, and sea-level budget. The present annual mass change time-series for the individual glaciers and the derived global gridded annual mass change product at a spatial resolution of 0.5° latitude and longitude will be made available from the WGMS webpage. During the review process, the dataset is temporarily available from URL: https://user.geo.uzh.ch/idussa/Dussaillant_etal_ESSD_data/.

Source: Earth system science data

DOI: 10.5194/essd-17-1977-2025