Climate impacts accelerating: WMO

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Climate impacts accelerating: WMO

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https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-r ... ge-impacts

From the report ...

Ocean heat: 2018 saw new records for ocean heat content in the upper 700 metres (data record started in from 1955) and upper 2000m (data record started in 2005), topping the previous record set in 2017. More than 90% of the energy trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans and ocean heat content provides a direct measure of this energy accumulation in the upper layers of the ocean.

Sea level: Sea level continues to rise at an accelerated rate. Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) for 2018 was around 3.7 millimetres higher than in 2017 and the highest on record. Over the period January 1993 to December 2018, the average rate of rise is 3.15 ± 0.3 mm yr-1 while the estimated acceleration is 0.1 mm yr-2. Increasing ice mass loss from the ice sheets is the main cause of the GMSL acceleration as revealed by satellite altimetry, according to the World Climate Research Programme global sea level budget group, 2018.

The Greenland ice sheet has been losing ice mass nearly every year over the past two decades. The surface mass budget (SMB) saw an increase due to above-average snowfall, particularly in eastern Greenland, and a near-average melt season. This led to a gain in overall SMB, but had little impact on the trend over the past two decades with the Greenland ice sheet having lost approximately 3,600 gigatons of ice mass since 2002. A recent study also examined ice cores taken from Greenland, which captured melting events back to the mid 1500s. The study determined that the recent level of melt events across the Greenland ice sheet have not occurred in at least the past 500 years.

Glacier Retreat: The World Glacier Monitoring Service monitors glacier mass balance using a set of global reference glaciers with more than 30 years of observations between 1950 and 2018. They cover 19 mountain regions. Preliminary results for 2018, based on a subset of glaciers, indicate that the hydrological year 2017/18 was the 31st consecutive year of negative mass balance.
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