Sea level fingerprints and regional sea level change

Abstract At global and basin scales, sea level change estimated from Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravity data (measuring mass) and Argo float data (measuring thermal expansion) agree well with satellite radar altimetry (measuring sea surface height). At regional scales, especially near coastlines, it is more difficult to compare GRACE + Argo estimates with altimetry due to limited spatial resolution of GRACE data, and associated signal leakage from land into oceans. Here we estimate ocean mass changes from GRACE data corrected for land to ocean signal leakage. The ocean mass estimates are compared with altimetry data over six selected coastal regions after considering steric changes and sea floor surface load deformation. The results show that sea level fingerprint mass change estimated using leakage-corrected GRACE data is in the better agreement with altimetry rates than Mascon estimates for these oceanic locations.