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A study published in Nature Geoscience found the technology behind satellite observations of mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is currently unable to separate long-term trends from short-term natural variability.
Prof Andrew Shepherd, Professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds, said:
“Their comparison of satellite and climate data helps us to better interpret changes of Earth’s polar ice sheets. It seems that studies based on less than a decade of satellite measurements are too short to establish, with confidence, whether the ice sheet losses are accelerating over time, and so we should be cautious about extrapolating short term trends into the future.
“Fortunately, we can appeal to data from other, longer satellite missions to get a long term perspective, and our own analysis of their data confirms that the rate of ice sheet losses has indeed accelerated over the past 20 years.”
‘Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability’ by B.Wouters et al., published in Nature Geoscience on Sunday 14 July.