Stratospheric transport and tropospheric sink of solar geoengineering aerosol: a Lagrangian analysis

Autor: Hongwei Sun, Stephen Bourguet, Lan Luan, David Keith
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, Vol 7, Iss 1, Pp 1-9 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2397-3722
DOI: 10.1038/s41612-024-00664-8
Popis: Abstract Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) aims to reflect solar radiation by increasing the stratospheric aerosol burden. To understand how the background circulation influences stratospheric transport of injected particles, we use a Lagrangian trajectory model (lacking numerical diffusion) to quantify particles’ number, flux, lifetime, and tropospheric sinks from a SAI injection strategy under present-day conditions. While particles are being injected, stratospheric particle number increases until reaching a steady-state. During the steady-state, the time series of particle number shows a dominant period of ~2 years (rather than a 1-year cycle), suggesting modulation by the quasi-biannual oscillation. More than half of particles, injected in the tropical lower stratosphere (15° S to 15° N, 65 hPa), undergo quasi-horizontal transport to the midlatitude. We find a zonal asymmetry of particles’ tropospheric sinks that are co-located with tropopause folding beneath the midlatitude jet stream, which can help predict tropospheric impacts of SAI (e.g., cirrus cloud thinning).
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