Abatement of World glaciers
Climate change generally is giving us warmer surface air temperatures, which in turn is causing a large majority of our world's glaciers to melt. On the other hand, climate change also gives us warmer oceans and hence greater precipitation, so a few coastal glaciers are reported to be increasing.
I'm certainly not a glaciologist, but thought I should add a glacial melting chart to my time series chart collection. Looking at already published charts, it quickly came apparent that glaciers have a number of key characteristics including length, thickness, area, density, mass, and volume, that can be measured and changes reported. That yields quite a variety of charts. Confounding matters further, different researches report results on an annual basis, on a 5-year or other multi-year average; other researches report cumulative changes but sometimes with different base years for initial or zero value.
Since my interest is in chronological trends and forecasts I decided to utilize 5 year moving average of published annual estimates of the mass balance averaged for all the world's glaciers. Mass balance is the difference between mass of snow added during accumulation less the mass lost during glacial abatement. As you can see from the units, the standard is to report as a thickness of water equivalents. Personally I prefer cm but I note others have used mm and also m to express water equivalents.
A flaw to my simple model is that it assumes infinite amount of glacier ice. Obviously not true. So a big flaw in my model is lack of response to loss of glaciers.
Mar2020: Replaced preliminary 2018 data with verified data & added preliminary 2019 data before calculating my 5 year moving average. Results entirely consistent with previous model's forecast.
![Picture](/uploads/4/4/8/0/44800773/arcticicevol2020_orig.jpg)
The world warms, the ice melts....
My chart shows the the largest and the smallest monthly average sea ice volume estimates for each year. Clearly both statistics continue to decrease significantly.
Jan2019 Update: 2018 results consistent with model; note forecast extended to 2200.
Mar2020 Update: 2019 results consistent with previous model.
My chart shows the the largest and the smallest monthly average sea ice volume estimates for each year. Clearly both statistics continue to decrease significantly.
Jan2019 Update: 2018 results consistent with model; note forecast extended to 2200.
Mar2020 Update: 2019 results consistent with previous model.