Glaciers have strongly contributed to sea-level rise during the past century and will continue to be an important part of the sea-level budget during the twenty-first century. Here, we review the progress in estimating global glacier mass change from in situ measurements of mass and length changes, remote sensing methods, and mass balance modeling driven by climate observations. For the period before the onset of satellite observations, different strategies to overcome the uncertainty associated with monitoring only a small sample of the world’s glaciers have been developed. These methods now yield estimates generally reconcilable with each other within their respective uncertainty margins. Whereas this is also the case for the recent decades, the greatly increased number of estimates obtained from remote sensing reveals that gravimetry-based methods typically arrive at lower mass loss estimates than the other methods. We suggest that strategies for better interconnecting the different methods are needed to ensure progress and to increase the temporal and spatial detail of reliable glacier mass change estimates.

中文翻译：

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基于观测的全球冰川质量变化估计及其对海平面变化的贡献

冰川在上个世纪对海平面上升做出了巨大贡献，并将继续成为二十一世纪海平面预算的重要组成部分。在这里，我们回顾了从质量和长度变化的原位测量、遥感方法和气候观测驱动的质量平衡模型估计全球冰川质量变化的进展。在卫星观测开始之前的时期，已经制定了不同的策略来克服与仅监测世界冰川的一小部分样本相关的不确定性。这些方法现在产生的估计值通常在各自的不确定性范围内相互协调。近几十年来也是如此，从遥感获得的估计数大大增加，这表明基于重力的方法通常比其他方法得出的质量损失估计值更低。我们建议，需要制定更好地互连不同方法的策略，以确保进展并增加可靠冰川质量变化估计的时间和空间细节。