A reconciled estimate of glacier contributions to sea level rise: 2003 to 2009Gardner, Alex S; Bolch, Tobias; et al Abstract: Glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are losing large amounts of water to the world's oceans. However, estimates of their contribution to sea level rise disagree. We provide a consensus estimate by standardizing existing, and creating new, mass-budget estimates from satellite gravimetry and altimetry and from local glaciological records. In many regions, local measurements are more negative than satellite-based estimates. All regions lost mass during [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009], with the largest losses from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes, and high-mountain Asia, but there was little loss from glaciers in Antarctica. Over this period, the global mass budget was -259 T 28 gigatons per year, equivalent to the combined loss from both ice sheets and accounting for 29 T 13% of the observed sea level rise.

Temperature index or degree-day models rest upon a claimed relationship between snow or ice melt and air temperature usually expressed in the form of positive temperatures. Since air temperature generally is the most readily available data, such models have been the most widely used method of ice and snow melt computations for many purposes, such as hydrological modelling, ice dynamic modelling or climate sensitivity studies. Despite their simplicity, temperature-index models have proven to be powerful tools for melt modelling, often on a catchment scale outperforming energy balance models. However, two shortcomings are evident: (1) although working well over long time periods their accuracy decreases with increasing temporal resolution; (2) spatial variability cannot be modelled accurately as melt rates may vary substantially due to topographic effects such as shading, slope and aspect angles. These effects are particularly crucial in mountain areas. This paper provides an overview of temperature-index methods, including glacier environments, and discusses recent advances on distributed approaches attempting to account for topographic effects in complex terrain, while retaining scarcity of data input. In the light of an increasing demand for melt estimates with high spatial and temporal resolution, such approaches need further refinement and development. q

The Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) is a globally complete collection of digital outlines of glaciers, excluding the ice sheets, developed to meet the needs of the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for estimates of past and future mass balance. The RGI was created with limited resources in a short period. Priority was given to completeness of coverage, but a limited, uniform set of attributes is attached to each of the ~198 000 glaciers in its latest version, 3.2. Satellite imagery from 1999–2010 provided most of the outlines. Their total extent is estimated as 726 800 ± 34 000 km2. The uncertainty, about ±5%, is derived from careful single-glacier and basin-scale uncertainty estimates and comparisons with inventories that were not sources for the RGI. The main contributors to uncertainty are probably misinterpretation of seasonal snow cover and debris cover. These errors appear not to be normally distributed, and quantifying them reliably is an unsolved problem. Combined with digital elevation models, the RGI glacier outlines yield hypsometries that can be combined with atmospheric data or model outputs for analysis of the impacts of climatic change on glaciers. The RGI has already proved its value in the generation of significantly improved aggregate estimates of glacier mass changes and total volume, and thus actual and potential contributions to sea-level rise.