This is the 33rd issuance of the annual assessment now known as State of the Climate, published in the Bulletin since 1996. As a supplement to the Bulletin, its foremost function is to document the status and trajectory of many components of the climate system.

Black carbon (BC) from fossil fuel and biomass combustion darkens the snow and makes it melt sooner. The BC footprint of research activities and tourism in Antarctica has likely increased as human presence in the continent has surged in recent decades.

An international, peer-reviewed publication released each summer, the State of the Climate is the authoritative annual summary of the global climate published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Most estimates of global mean sea-level rise this century fall below 2 m. This quantity is comparable to the positive vertical bias of the principle digital elevation model (DEM) used to assess global and national population exposures to extreme coastal water levels, NASA’s SRTM. CoastalDEM is a new DEM utilizing neural networks to reduce SRTM error. Here we show – employing CoastalDEM—that 190 M people (150–250 M, 90% CI) currently occupy global land below projected high tide lines for 2100 under low carbon emissions, up from 110 M today, for a median increase of 80 M.

Last January, a study in Nature Climate Change showed the world's glaciers are the smallest they've been in human history, revealing radiocarbon material that hasn't been exposed for 40,000 years.

Scientists have discovered a network of lakes beneath the largest glacier in East Antarctica, a finding that may be critical in predicting how the melting of polar ice will change the world’s ocean

Australian researchers have discovered huge underwater lakes beneath the largest glacier in east Antarctica.

Recent studies suggest that Antarctica has the potential to contribute up to ~15 m of sea-level rise over the next few centuries. The evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is driven by a combination of climate forcing and non-climatic feedbacks.

Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing four-fold since 2003, new research has found.

Yearly loss of ice from Antarctica has increased by an alarming rate of 280 per cent between 2001 and 2017, according to a study which showed that accelerated melting caused global sea levels to ri

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