CPOM contributed to the European State of the Climate 2020 report, an annual report compiled by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Commission. This year, we contributed to two sections: the ice sheets section as well as a new thematic section on the cryosphere as a whole.

The ice sheets are included in this report as a climate indicator, and we provided estimates of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets mass balance produced by IMBIE.

We also contributed to the cryosphere section which includes the ice sheets, mountain glaciers and sea ice and provides a broad overview of the cryosphere. It shows large changes in these three components, with the ice sheets losing a volume of ice equivalent to 10 times the volume of lake Garda, glaciers losing three times the volume of the European Alps during the past decade and sea ice losing an area 5 times the area of Spain between the 1980s and 2010s.

Here are the links to the sections of the report we contributed to:

https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/cryosphere

https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/ice-sheets

Figure 1. Components of the cryosphere. Based on Lemke et al. 2007. Credit: C3S/ECMWF

Figure 2. Changes over time in key cryosphere components: ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice. Data source: Ice sheets (IMBIE/ESA/NASA), glaciers (WGMS), sea ice extent (EUMETSAT OSI SAF), sea ice thickness (C3S). Credit: C3S/ECMWF/University of Leeds/WGMS/EUMETSAT OSI SAF/AWI.