Sea-level fingerprints due to ongoing land ice melting in altimetry-based sea-level data

Satellite altimetry over the oceans shows that the rate of sea-level rise is far from being uniform, with reported regional rates up to 2-3 times the global mean rate of rise of 3.3 mm/year. The mechanisms causing the regional variations in sea-level trends are dominated by ocean temperature and salinity changes, but other processes such as ocean mass redistribution and static factors also contribute to the regional sea-level trend patterns (the latter contribution being called sea-level fingerprints). The static terms include solid Earths deformations and gravitational changes in response to past and on-going mass redistributions caused by land ice melt and land water storage changes. Here we attempt to detect the spatial trend patterns of the fingerprints associated with present-day land ice melting using satellite altimetry-based sea-level grids corrected for the steric component. A statistically significant correlation is found between altimetry-based sea-level and modeled fingerprints in some regions of the oceanic basins. We also examine spatial trend patterns in observed GRACE-based ocean mass corrected for atmospheric and oceanic loading and find that over the oceanic domain, these are dominated by the fingerprints of present-day land ice melt.