Mass changes of land ice (e.g., glaciers and ice sheets) lead to a geographically variable pattern in regional sea level, also called “sea level fingerprints”. Sea level fingerprints associated with contemporary land ice mass changes can be derived by solving the sea level equation, in which changes in Earth’s gravity and rotation, and viscoelastic solid-earth deformation are included. In most existing studies, fingerprints are computed with limited spatial resolution, due to numerical methods and simplified Earth’s crustal structure in 1-D earth model, which might result in some inaccuracies or over-confidence in the fingerprints.

In our research, we use the sea level fingerprint module of the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), recently developed by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), to improve the sea level fingerprint in response to contemporary land ice mass changes in a rotating, elastic earth model with fixed shoreline geometry. We run the module to provide high-resolution sea level fingerprints driven by historical land ice mass changes from monthly Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and altimetry observations. Moreover, we produce future sea level fingerprints based on future projections of land ice mass changes from the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM), and the ensemble of Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6). We also explore the sensitivity of sea level fingerprints to the uncertainties in future land ice melting based on different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios, and to the uncertainties in Earth’s crustal structures parameterized in 1-D earth model.