Sea level variability caused by changing Antarctic and Greenland mass loss

Mass loss from Antarctica and Greenland exhibits large variability, both temporally and spatially. While this mass loss contributes to a globally averaged sea level rise, it also drives large scale geographic variability in sea level. The crustal uplift beneath and near the ice sheets, together with the changing gravity fields, cause sea level to fall near the ice sheets and to rise by greater than the global average in far field. If we assume that the Earth's response is adequately represented by elastic model, then these patterns are only dependent upon the spatial distribution of the mass loss. As the regional distribution of the mass loss from a given ice sheet changes with time, e.g. the increasing contribution of from west central Greenland, the patterns of sea level will change with them. In this presentation, we investigate the impact of the spatial and temporal variability of mass loss from Antarctica and Greenland on sea level observations.