Trend of mass change in the Antarctic ice sheet recovered from the GRACE temporal gravity field

It is important to quantify mass variations in the Antarctic ice sheet to study the global sea-level rise and climate change. A hybrid filtering scheme employing a combination of the decorrelated filter P3M6 and 300 km Fan filter was used, and the surface mass variations over the Antarctic are recovered from GRACE CSR RL04 monthly gravity field models from August 2002 to June 2010. After deduction of leakage errors using the GLDAS hydrological model and postglacial rebound effects using the glacial isostatic adjustment model IJ05, the variations in the ice sheet mass are obtained. The results reveal that the rate of melting of the Antarctic ice sheet is 80.0 Gt/a and increasing and contributes 0.22 mm/a to the global sea-level rise; the mass loss rate is 78.3 Gt/a in the West Antarctic and 1.6 Gt/a in the East Antarctic. The average mass loss rate increases from 39.3 Gt/a for the period 2002-2005 to 104.2 Gt/a for the period 2006-2010, and its corresponding contribution to the global sea-level rise increases from 0.11 to 0.29 mm/a, which indicates accelerated ice mass loss over the Antarctic since 2006. Moreover, the mass accumulation rates for Enderby Land and Wilkes Land along the coast of East Antarctica decrease for the period 2006-2008 but increase evidently after 2009.