Beschreibung: Glaciers in the European Alps are known to be strongly affected by global climate change. Here we provide temporally consistent changes in glacier area, surface elevation and ice mass over the entire European Alps between 2000 and 2014. Our measurements show strong glacier surface lowering throughout the European Alps with regional variability in average ice thickness changes (-0.5 to -0.9 ma-1). For the entire Alps we estimate a mass loss of 1.3±0.2 Gta-1 (2000-2014). Our results provide important information for future socio-economic research, such as water resource management, tourism and risk assessment, and for the calibration and validation of glacier change projections. The dataset includes glacier elevation change maps (GeoTiffs) of the entire European Alps for the periods 2000-2012 and 2000-2014. Elevation changes are derived from differencing Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the SRTM and TanDEM-X satellite missions. Average surface elevation change rates (ma-1) were calculated based on specifically generated glacier outlines (2000, 2011 & 2014) and outlines of the Randolph Glacier Inventory (V6.0 Central Europe). Elevation change maps are cropped to Randolph Glacier Inventory outlines and the spatial union of specific glacier outlines from 2000 and 2011 (for elevation change 2000-2012) and 2000 and 2014 (for elevation change 2000-2014), respectively. See the associated publication for further details regarding the datasets and calculation of surface elevation change and geodetic mass change with a temporal mean area. All elevation change maps are provided as GeoTiffs with a spatial resolution of approximately 30m. Please note that the provided elevation change measurements are not filtered (no outlier removal applied). The observation period of each raster cell is measured in years between the respective TanDEM-X DEM and the SRTM reference DEM. As reference date the mean date of the SRTM mission (2000-02-16) is used.

Beschreibung: The Earth climate system is out of energy balance, and heat has accumulated continuously over the past decades, warming the ocean, the land, the cryosphere, and the atmosphere. According to the Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this planetary warming over multiple decades is human-driven and results in unprecedented and committed changes to the Earth system, with adverse impacts for ecosystems and human systems. The Earth heat inventory provides a measure of the Earth energy imbalance (EEI) and allows for quantifying how much heat has accumulated in the Earth system, as well as where the heat is stored. Here we show that the Earth system has continued to accumulate heat, with 381±61 ZJ accumulated from 1971 to 2020. This is equivalent to a heating rate (i.e., the EEI) of 0.48±0.1 W m−2. The majority, about 89 %, of this heat is stored in the ocean, followed by about 6 % on land, 1 % in the atmosphere, and about 4 % available for melting the cryosphere. Over the most recent period (2006–2020), the EEI amounts to 0.76±0.2 W m−2. The Earth energy imbalance is the most fundamental global climate indicator that the scientific community and the public can use as the measure of how well the world is doing in the task of bringing anthropogenic climate change under control. Moreover, this indicator is highly complementary to other established ones like global mean surface temperature as it represents a robust measure of the rate of climate change and its future commitment. We call for an implementation of the Earth energy imbalance into the Paris Agreement's Global Stocktake based on best available science. The Earth heat inventory in this study, updated from von Schuckmann et al. (2020), is underpinned by worldwide multidisciplinary collaboration and demonstrates the critical importance of concerted international efforts for climate change monitoring and community-based recommendations and we also call for urgently needed actions for enabling continuity, archiving, rescuing, and calibrating efforts to assure improved and long-term monitoring capacity of the global climate observing system. The data for the Earth heat inventory are publicly available, and more details are provided in Table 4.