Data from: "Inventory of Earth's Ice Loss and Associated Energy Uptake from 1979 to 2017"

Earth’s cryosphere is a buffer to the warming of the planet and its loss must be accounted for in planetary energy budgets. Yet, even as melting ice is an evident manifestation of climate change, inventories of its energy uptake are largely lacking, based on inconsistent methods, or limited to the fraction that contributes to sea level rise. By combining recent syntheses, we undertake a systematic estimate of ice loss to show that Earth lost 40700 ± 5800 Gt of ice with a corresponding energy uptake of 13.8 ± 2.0 ZJ, from 1979 to 2017, larger than previous estimates and equivalent to the energy uptake by the deep ocean, the land and the atmosphere. The total loss is due to approximately equal contributions from Arctic sea-ice, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and glaciers. Only half of it contributed to sea level rise. From the 1980s to the 2010s, the rate of ice loss has almost tripled.

In this HDF5 dataset, we provide cumulative annual estimates of energy uptake for three components of the cryosphere in Zetajoules (10²¹ Joules):

1) Antarctica
2) Greenland
2) Glaciers
3) Sea Ice

For 1–3, we separate energy uptake contributions for the grounded and floating components. We also provide a Matlab file with code to read the fields in the dataset.

Python code to read the data is available at: https://github.com/sioglaciology/energy_imbalance_cryosphere