An interactive stratospheric aerosol model intercomparison of solar geoengineering by stratospheric injection of SO 2 or accumulation-mode sulfuric acid aerosols

• Published in: Atmospheric chemistry and physics 2022-03, Vol.22 (5), p.2955-2973
• Main Authors: Weisenstein, Debra K., Visioni, Daniele, Franke, Henning, Niemeier, Ulrike, Vattioni, Sandro, Chiodo, Gabriel, Peter, Thomas, Keith, David W.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1680-7324; 1680-7324
• DOI: 10.5194/acp-22-2955-2022

Studies of stratospheric solar geoengineering have tended to focus on modification of the sulfuric acid aerosol layer, and almost all climate model experiments that mechanistically increase the sulfuric acid aerosol burden assume injection of SO2. A key finding from these model studies is that the radiative forcing would increase sublinearly with increasing SO2 injection because most of the added sulfur increases the mass of existing particles, resulting in shorter aerosol residence times and aerosols that are above the optimal size for scattering. Injection of SO3 or H2SO4 from an aircraft in stratospheric flight is expected to produce particles predominantly in the accumulation-mode size range following microphysical processing within an expanding plume, and such injection may result in a smaller average stratospheric particle size, allowing a given injection of sulfur to produce more radiative forcing. We report the first multi-model intercomparison to evaluate this approach, which we label AM-H2SO4 injection. A coordinated multi-model experiment designed to represent this SO3- or H2SO4-driven geoengineering scenario was carried out with three interactive stratospheric aerosol microphysics models: the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Earth System Model (CESM2) with the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) atmospheric configuration, the Max-Planck Institute's middle atmosphere version of ECHAM5 with the HAM microphysical module (MAECHAM5-HAM) and ETH's SOlar Climate Ozone Links with AER microphysics (SOCOL-AER) coordinated as a test-bed experiment within the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). The intercomparison explores how the injection of new accumulation-mode particles changes the large-scale particle size distribution and thus the overall radiative and dynamical response to stratospheric sulfur injection. Each model used the same injection scenarios testing AM-H2SO4 and SO2 injections at 5 and 25 Tg(S) yr−1 to test linearity and climate response sensitivity. All three models find that AM-H2SO4 injection increases the radiative efficacy, defined as the radiative forcing per unit of sulfur injected, relative to SO2 injection. Increased radiative efficacy means that when compared to the use of SO2 to produce the same radiative forcing, AM-H2SO4 emissions would reduce side effects of sulfuric acid aerosol geoengineering that are proportional to mass burden. The model studies were carried out with