Improved Earth Oblateness Rate Reveals Increased Ice Sheet Losses and Mass‐Driven Sea Level Rise

By Bryant D Loomis, Kenneth Rachlin, Scott B. Luthcke. Geophysical Research Letters, 2019

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Satellite laser ranging (SLR) observations are routinely applied toward the estimation of dynamic oblateness, C20, which is the largest globally integrated component of Earth's time‐variable gravity field. Since 2002, GRACE and GRACE Follow‐On have revolutionized the recovery of higher spatial resolution features of global time‐variable gravity, with SLR continuing to provide the most reliable estimates of C20. We quantify the effect of various SLR processing strategies on estimating C20 and demonstrate better signal recovery with the inclusion of GRACE‐derived low‐degree gravity information in the forward model. This improved SLR product modifies the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheet mass trends by −15.4 and −3.5 Gt/year, respectively, as compared to CSR TN11, and improves global mean sea level budget closure by modifying sea level rise by +0.08 mm/year. We recommend that this new C20 product be applied to RL06 GRACE data products for enhanced accuracy and scientific interpretation.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atmospheric Science, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d498fb47a52d803f19248269c962872ce8bcc99

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Citations in the corpus

Continuity of Ice Sheet Mass Loss in Greenland and Antarctica From the GRACE and GRACE Follow‐On Missions (2020, methodology): “…and improve the quality of the GRACE/GRACE-FO solution during the single-accelerometer months, for example, the C3,0 harmonic time series derived from Satellite Laser Ranging provided by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) as a part of the GRACE TN-14 auxiliary data (Loomis et al., 2019).”
Replacing GRACE/GRACE‐FO C30 With Satellite Laser Ranging: Impacts on Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Change (2020, methodology): “Both the weights and arc length are slight departures from Loomis et al. (2019a), which used 28-day arcs for LAGEOS-1/2 and weighted the five satellites according to Cheng and Ries (2017).”
Continuity of the Mass Loss of the World's Glaciers and Ice Caps From the GRACE and GRACE Follow‐On Missions (2020, methodology): “We employ monthly C2,0 coefficients from satellite laser ranging provided by GSFC (Loomis et al., 2019) C2,0 Stokes coefficients calculated using a time-variable gravity model derived from GRACE in the forward modeling of the SLR solution (Loomis et al., 2019), as opposed to the fixed background mod”
Extending the Global Mass Change Data Record: GRACE Follow‐On Instrument and Science Data Performance (2020, methodology): “Recent improvements in SLR processing (Loomis et al., 2019) have led to new SLR‐ C20 estimates that are provided in Technical Note 14 (TN‐14), replacing the previously recommended Technical Note 11 (TN‐11; Cheng et al., 2013).”