Data from: High-latitude stratospheric aerosol geoengineering may be more effective if injection is limited to spring

• Main Authors: Lee, Walker Raymond, MacMartin, Douglas G., Visioni, Daniele, Kravitz, Ben
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: geoengineering; climate engineering; Arctic geoengineering; stratospheric aerosol injection; climate modeling; Arctic; Atkinson; Pacific; Global warming; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1813/103632; https://doi.org/10.7298/d557-db75

Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering focused on the Arctic could substantially reduce local and worldwide impacts of anthropogenic global warming. Because the Arctic receives little sunlight during the winter, stratospheric aerosols present in the winter at high latitudes have little impact on the climate, whereas stratospheric aerosols present during the summer achieve larger changes in radiative forcing. Injecting SO2 in the spring leads to peak aerosol optical depth (AOD) in the summer. The data presented here contains the results of our simulations, in which we demonstrate that spring injection produces approximately twice as much summer AOD as year-round injection and restores approximately twice as much September sea ice, resulting in less increase in stratospheric sulfur burden, stratospheric heating, and stratospheric ozone depletion per unit of sea ice restored. We also find that differences in AOD between different seasonal injection strategies are small compared to the difference between annual and spring injection. We would like to acknowledge high‐performance computing support from Cheyenne (doi:10.5065/D6RX99HX) provided by NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Support for WL and DM was provided by the National Science Foundation through agreement CBET‐1818759. Support for DV was provided by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. Support for BK was provided in part by the National Sciences Foundation through agreement CBET-1931641, the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, and the Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE‐AC05‐76RL01830. The CESM project is supported primarily by the National Science Foundation. This work was supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the ...