Response to Comment by T. SCAMBOS and C. SHUMAN (2016) on ‘Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses’ by H. J. Zwally and others (2015)
Response to Comment by T. SCAMBOS and C. SHUMAN (2016) on ‘Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses’ by H. J. Zwally and others (2015)
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对 T. SCAMBOS 和 C. SHUMAN（2016）关于 H. J. Zwally 等人（2015）“南极冰盖的质量增益超过损失”的评论的回应
DOI：
10.1017/jog.2016.91
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
A. Brenner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
H. Zwally;Jun Li;J. Robbins;J. Saba;D. Yi;A. Brenner
Scambos和Shuman（2016年）指出：“这种对（冰质量平衡）更好理解的需求超出了冰川学界，包括政策制定者和公众。出于这个原因，我们认为作为科学家，尽最大努力提供最准确的结果是很重要的，而不仅仅是接受以前发表的结果而不进行批判性的评估。Scambos和Shuman断言我们的结果......是不符合大量的机构以前发表的工作'和'的.这一结论在最近的南极物质平衡研究中显然是一个异常值。他们的断言基于对以前发表的工作的选择性概述，忽略不同意他们观点的论文，忽视以前工作中的不确定性，并且没有认识到需要继续改进。他们在很大程度上依赖于冰质量平衡相互比较练习（IMBIE）（Shepherd等人，2012），他们说“这是当时几乎所有高质量平衡估计的调和”。然而，IMBIE只是取了选定估计的平均值，并没有实际调和调查或解释其原因的意义上的显著差异。Scambos和Shuman没有提到的一份重要的评论文件是Hanna和其他人（2013年），他们回顾了IMBIE之后的进展，讨论了剩余的不确定性和可能的原因，并建议进行额外的研究，特别是在东南极洲（EA）。我们完全相信我们的论文代表了科学知识的进步，基于严格的分析和减少不确定性。我们仍然对我们的结果和结论充满信心。我们仔细考虑了与我们相关的先前工作，并提供了我们的结果与其他关键论文不同的原因。总的来说，我们相信Scambos和Shuman所表达的担忧将通过彻底阅读我们的论文，并注意我们提供的关于我们的方法的科学和技术细节，我们提出的论点，支持性分析以及我们对其他同行评审文献的支持性参考而得到极大的缓解。我们的研究结果是在基本协议与其他研究表明，在南极洲半岛和Thwaites和松岛地区的西南极洲（WA），在相对较小的地区观察到较大的变化，质量损失增加，但不同的内部的西南极洲（WA 2）和EA，在那里的变化是小的大面积。非常重要的是，Scambos和Shuman没有认识到我们的ERS-1/ERS-2结果对EA的重要性，以及它们与我们的ICESat结果的非常接近的一致性，无论是在81.5 S以北的共同观测区域，还是特别是在东方湖。先前基于ERS-1和ERS-2的无可辩驳的结果显示了EA的冰盖增长，包括：Wingham等人（1998年）; Davis等人（2005年）; Zwally等人（2005年）以及Wingham等人（2006年）。特别是，
Scambos and Shuman (2016) state:‘This need for an improved understanding (of ice mass balance) extends beyond the glaciological community and includes policy makers and the general public.’For this reason, we believe it is important as scientists to make our best efforts to provide the most accurate results, and not merely accept previously published results without critical evaluation. Scambos and Shuman’assert that our ‘result…. is inconsistent with a large body of previously published work’and that ‘The…. conclusion is clearly an outlier among recent studies of Antarctic mass balance.’They base their assertions on a selective overview of previously published work, ignoring papers that do not agree with their view, overlooking uncertainties in prior work, and not recognizing the need for continued improvement. They rely heavily on the Ice Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE)(Shepherd and others, 2012), which they say ‘was a reconciliation of nearly all high quality mass balance estimates at that time’.However, IMBIE simply took the mean of selected estimates and did not actually reconcile significant differences in the sense of investigating or explaining their causes. An important review paper not mentioned by Scambos and Shuman’is Hanna and others (2013) that reviewed the progress following IMBIE, discussed the remaining uncertainties and likely causes, and recommended additional research, especially for East Antarctica (EA). We fully believe our paper represents an advancement in scientific knowledge, based on rigorous analysis and reduction of uncertainties. We continue to have high confidence in our results and conclusions. We carefully considered prior work in relation to ours and provided reasons why our results differed from key other papers. Overall, we believe the concerns expressed by Scambos and Shuman’would have been substantially alleviated by a thorough reading of our paper with attention to the scientific and technical details we provided about our methodologies, the arguments we made, the supporting analyses, and our supporting references to other peer-reviewed literature. Our results are in essential agreement with other studies that show an increasing mass loss in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica (WA), where large changes are observed over relatively small areas, but differ in the interior of West Antarctica (WA2) and EA, where the changes are small over large areas. Very importantly, Scambos and Shuman’fail to recognize the significance of our ERS-1/ERS-2 results for EA and their very close agreement with our ICESat results, both in general over their common observation region north of 81.5 S and in particular over Lake Vostok. Previous unrefuted results based on ERS-1 and ERS-2 showing ice-sheet growth in EA include: Wingham and others (1998); Davis and others (2005); Zwally and others (2005), and Wingham and others (2006). In particular,