Articles | Volume 13, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-201-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-201-2022
Research article
 | 
25 Jan 2022
Research article |  | 25 Jan 2022

How large is the design space for stratospheric aerosol geoengineering?

Yan Zhang, Douglas G. MacMartin, Daniele Visioni, and Ben Kravitz

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Cited articles

Aksamit, N. O., Kravitz, B., MacMartin, D. G., and Haller, G.: Harnessing Stratospheric Diffusion Barriers for Enhanced Climate Geoengineering, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 8845–8861, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-8845-2021, 2021. a, b
Bala, G., Duffy, P. B., and Taylor, K. E.: Impact of geoengineering schemes on the global hydrological cycle, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 105, 7664–7669, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0711648105, 2008. a
Ban-Weiss, G. A. and Caldeira, K.: Geoengineering as an optimization problem, Environ. Res. Lett., 5, 034009, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034009, 2010. a
Bernstein, D. N., Neelin, J. D., Li, Q. B., and Chen, D.: Could aerosol emissions be used for regional heat wave mitigation?, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 6373–6390, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-13-6373-2013, 2013. a
Dai, Z., Weisenstein, D., and Keith, D. W.: Tailoring meridional and seasonal radiative forcing by sulfate aerosol solar geoengineering, Geophys. Res. Lett., 45, 1030–1039, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076472, 2018. a, b
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Short summary
Adding SO2 to the stratosphere could temporarily cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back to space. However, adding SO2 at different latitude(s) and season(s) leads to significant differences in regional surface climate. This study shows that, to cool the planet by 1–1.5 °C, there are likely six to eight choices of injection latitude(s) and season(s) that lead to meaningfully different distributions of climate impacts.
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