Identification

Title

Quantifying the efficiency of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering at different altitudes

Abstract

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) of reflective sulfate aerosols has been proposed to temporarily reduce the impacts of global warming. In this study, we compare two SAI simulations which inject at different altitudes to provide the same amount of cooling, finding that lower-altitude SAI requires 64% more injection. SAI at higher altitudes cools the surface more efficiently per unit injection than lower-altitude SAI through two primary mechanisms: the longer lifetimes of SO2 and SO4 at higher altitudes, and the water vapor feedback, in which lower-altitude SAI causes more heating in the tropical cold point tropopause region, thereby increasing water vapor transport into the stratosphere and trapping more terrestrial infrared radiation that offsets some of the direct aerosol-induced cooling. We isolate these individual mechanisms and find that the contribution of lifetime effects to differences in cooling efficiency is approximately five to six times larger than the contribution of the water vapor feedback.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7z60t35

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2023-07-28T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact