Glacier melt in High Mountain Asia (HMA) is an indicator of climate change and has a major impact on the regional hydrology and freshwater supply. We determined the recent status of HMA glaciers based on the first analysis of Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite‐2 (ICESat‐2) data. We used the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow‐On (FO) data to complement ICESat‐1,2 data and validate them independently. We find a good agreement between ICESat‐1,2 and GRACE/GRACE‐FO data, which demonstrates the high reliability of results. Based on our results, the continuous glacier mass change from 2003 to 2019 is −28 ± 6 Gt yr⁻¹, which is more negative than stereo imagery‐based studies. The regional variability of the glaciers ranges from −1.07 ± 0.10 m yr⁻¹ in southeastern Nyaingentanglha to +0.16 ± 0.10 m yr⁻¹ in West Kunlun. ICESat‐2 data enable new insight into the continuous measurement of HMA glacier elevation change.

The global mean sea level (GMSL) was reported to have dropped 5 mm due to the 2010/2011 La Niña and have recovered in 1 year. With longer observations, it is shown that the GMSL went further up to a total amount of 11.6 mm by the end of 2012, excluding the 3.0 mm/yr background trend. A reconciled sea level budget, based on observations by Argo project, altimeter, and gravity satellites, reveals that the true GMSL rise has been masked by El Niño–Southern Oscillation‐related fluctuations and its rate has increased since 2010. After extracting the influence of land water storage, it is shown that the GMSL has been rising at a rate of 4.4 ± 0.5 mm/yr for more than 3 years, due to an increase in the rate of both land ice loss and steric change.

Complex landforms, miscellaneous climates, and enormous populations have influenced various geophysical phenomena in China, which range from water depletion in the underground to retreating glaciers on high mountains and have attracted abundant scientific interest. This paper, which utilizes gravity observations during 2003–2014 from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), intends to comprehensively estimate the mass status in 16 drainage basins in the region. We propose a multibasin inversion method that features resistance to stripe noise and an ability to alleviate signal attenuation from the truncation and smoothing of GRACE data. The results show both positive and negative trends. Tremendous mass accumulation has occurred from the Tibetan Plateau (12.1 ± 0.6 Gt/yr) to the Yangtze River (7.7 ± 1.3 Gt/yr) and southeastern coastal areas, which is suggested to involve an increase in the groundwater storage, lake and reservoir water volume, and the flow of materials from tectonic processes. Additionally, mass loss has occurred in the Huang‐Huai‐Hai‐Liao River Basin (−10.2 ± 0.9 Gt/yr), the Brahmaputra‐Nujiang‐Lancang River Basin (−15.0 ± 1.1 Gt/yr), and Tienshan Mountain (−4.1 ± 0.3 Gt/yr), a result of groundwater pumping and glacier melting. Areas with groundwater depletion are consistent with the distribution of cities with land subsidence in North China. We find that intensified precipitation can alter the local water supply and that GRACE can adequately capture these dynamics, which could be instructive for China's South‐to‐North Water Diversion hydrologic project.

Anthropogenic depletion of terrestrial water storage (TWS) can be alleviated in wet years and intensified in dry years, and this wet/dry pattern spanning seasons to years is termed climate variability. However, the anthropogenic and climate‐driven changes have not been isolated in previous studies; thus, the estimated trend of changes in TWS is strongly dependent on the study period. Here we try to remove the influence of climate variability from the estimation of the anthropogenic contribution, which is an indicator of the environmental burden and important for TWS projections. Toward this end, we propose a linear relationship between the variation in water storage and precipitation. Factors related to the sensitivity of water storage to precipitation are given to correct for the climate variability, and the anthropogenic depletion of terrestrial water and groundwater in Asia is estimated to be −187 ± 38 Gt/yr and −100 ± 47 Gt/yr, respectively.

Mascon solutions, one of the recent advances in Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) products, are being widely used due to their significant improvement in spatial accuracy and their ability to be directly employed without post-processing. However, few studies have verified the performance of mascon solutions at different regional scales, especially those smaller than GRACE's native resolution. We investigated the consistency between mascon and spherical harmonic solutions (hereafter named mascon and SH solutions) as release-05 products from the Center for Space Research and determined whether mascon solutions had a higher resolution than SH solutions (approximately 300 km). In addition, we used ICESat, LEGOS and DAHITI observations of water levels as independent supplementary data to validate the comparison results. We considered three cases of mass signals with varying spatial scales to examine the performance of mascon solutions in specific regions: (1) the abrupt water-level change in Longyang Reservoir (an area smaller than 1° × 1°) driven by heavy rainfall, (2) mass increase in the middle and lower Yangtze River basin and (3) mass loss of Tianshan Mountain glaciers and their subregions, including Bosten Lake at the foot of the glaciers. We concluded that mascon solutions have the potential to reveal gravity signals in areas larger than 3° × 3° from mass sources of Terrestrial Water Storage Anomalies, whereas they perform poorer than gridded SH products or SH solutions with a decorrelation filter in some specific regions smaller than 3° × 3°. The results of the three different cases provide references to non-geodetic users to select suitable GRACE solutions for different applications.