Sea Level Budgets Should Account for Ocean Bottom Deformation

The conventional sea level budget (SLB) equates changes in sea surface height with the sum of ocean mass and steric change, where solid-Earth movements are included as corrections but limited to the impact of glacial isostatic adjustment. However, changes in ocean mass load also deform the ocean bottom elastically. Until the early 2000s,...

Seasonal variations in sea level induced by continental water mass: First results from GRACE

Variations in the Earth's water cycle are commonly quantified by their effect on global mean sea?level. However, the interaction between passive adjustment of the ocean to changes in gravitational attraction due to mass redistribution, the related deformation of the solid Earth and disturbances in the Earth's rotation vector will yield a...

Sea?level fingerprint of continental water and ice mass change from GRACE

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites (GRACE) provide, for the first time, a method to directly measure mass exchange between the land and oceans over time. The dominant components of this exchange are due to continental ice loss/gain and land hydrology. Here, we determine the secular trend in these two components during the...