A multi-model assessment of regional climate disparities caused by solar geoengineering

By Ben Kravitz, Douglas G. MacMartin, A. Robock, Philip J. Rasch, K. Ricke, J. Cole, C. Curry, P. Irvine, D. Ji, David William Keith and 8 more. 2014

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global-scale solar geoengineering is the deliberate modification of the climate system to offset some amount of anthropogenic climate change by reducing the amount of incident solar radiation at the surface. These changes to the planetary energy budget result in differential regional climate effects. For the first time, we quantitatively evaluate the potential for regional disparities in a multi-model context using results from a model experiment that offsets the forcing from a quadrupling of CO2 via reduction in solar irradiance. We evaluate temperature and precipitation changes in 22 geographic regions spanning most of Earthʼs continental area. Moderate amounts of solar reduction (up to 85% of the amount that returns global mean temperatures to preindustrial levels) result in regional temperature values that are closer to preindustrial levels than an un-geoengineered, high CO2 world for all regions and all models. However, in all but one model, there is at least one region for which no amount of solar reduction can restore precipitation toward its preindustrial value. For most metrics considering simultaneous changes in both variables, temperature and precipitation values in all regions are closer to the preindustrial climate for a moderate amount of solar reduction than for no solar reduction.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f4a2f34a48e3270549d5543fb323933d2e46908

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In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Impacts, effectiveness and regional inequalities of the GeoMIP G1 to G4 solar radiation management scenarios (2015, methodology): “The regional inequalities in Kravitz et al. (2014) were demonstrated by regional differences in the path of temperature, precipitation and combined metric of temperature and precipitation changes under different strength of solar irradiation reduction.”
The Climate Response to Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering Can Be Tailored Using Multiple Injection Locations (2017, background): “One of the key questions is what the climate effects would be, including concern over differential regional effects (Kravitz et al., 2014; Ricke et al., 2010).”