My reading of Figure 6 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298 suggests that this study still has thermosteric effects making up the majority of sea level rise.

I also highly recommend reading up on the GRACE satellite used in this study it is amazing https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/50/how-grace-fo-measu...

> it is amazing

Indeed!

The GRACE measurement of mass change is one of the more revolutionary advances in Earth science remote sensing in the last few decades. It has provided a unique and completely novel view of groundwater mass change. Grace is the main reason we know so much about the massive groundwater loss in the Oglala aquifer in the US Midwest, in the Central Basin in California, and in northern India. Water well data exists but it is very sparse and idiosyncratic.

It’s also our main window into mass losses in ice sheets in high latitudes (Greenland, Antarctica). We have radar altimetry data from Antarctica, but because of glacial rebound and other effects, it’s not easy to translate height changes into mass changes. Grace measures mass change directly.

Several authors of the cited study are on the science team. It is a JPL instrument.

The original Grace pair used radio to measure separation and velocity, while the follow-up Grace-FO uses a laser. I assume the small wavelength of the laser provides a more accurate measurement. It’s possible that Grace-FO has a slightly higher spatial resolution (I’ve worked with Grace but not Grace-FO); the horizontal resolution of Grace is about 100km or about 1 degree.

From an inference perspective the measurement is very interesting. They pool about a month’s worth of observations of the distance and velocity of a pair of satellites, and do a Bayesian inversion to obtain a parameterized gravitational potential for that month. The map from gravitational potential to observation is known analytically, so it’s readily possible to get a spatial covariance for the gravitational potential, as well as the point estimate.

Thank you for sharing, GRACE-FO feels to me like a brilliant design!