Click the link to access the report on the Springer Nature Link website (Matthew Rodell, Anne Barnoud, Franklin R. Robertson, Richard P. Allan, Ashley Bellas-Manley, Michael G. Bosilovich, Don Chambers, Felix Landerer, Bryant Loomis, R. Steven Nerem, Mary Michael O’Neill, David Wiese & Sonia I. Seneviratne). Here’s the abstract:
November 4, 2024
As observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow On (GRACE-FO) missions, global terrestrial water storage (TWS), excluding ice sheets and glaciers, declined rapidly between May 2014 and March 2016. By 2023, it had not yet recovered, with the upper end of its range remaining 1 cm equivalent height of water below the upper end of the earlier range. Beginning with a record-setting drought in northeastern South America, a series of droughts on five continents helped to prevent global TWS from rebounding. While back-to-back El Niño events are largely responsible for the South American drought and others in the 2014–2016 timeframe, the possibility exists that global warming has contributed to a net drying of the land since then, through enhanced evapotranspiration and increasing frequency and intensity of drought. Corollary to the decline in global TWS since 2015 has been a rise in barystatic sea level (i.e., global mean ocean mass). However, we find no evidence that it is anything other than a coincidence that, also in 2015, two estimates of barystatic sea level change, one from GRACE/FO and the other from a combination of satellite altimetry and Argo float ocean temperature measurements, began to diverge. Herein, we discuss both the mechanisms that account for the abrupt decline in terrestrial water storage and the possible explanations for the divergence of the barystatic sea level change estimates.
Article Highlights
- Global terrestrial water storage, excluding glaciers and ice sheets, declined abruptly between May 2014 and March 2016, with a corollary increase in sea level
- A series of droughts, possibly linked to global warming, has since helped to prevent global terrestrial water storage from recovering
- Also around 2015, two independent estimates of barystatic sea level began to diverge, but we find no evidence of a connection with the terrestrial water storage decline
