the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Assessing the Impact of Solar Climate Intervention on Future U.S. Weather Using a Convection-Permitting WRF Model
Abstract. A primary solar climate intervention (SCI) strategy is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). SAI would increase the number of small reflective particles (aerosols) in the upper atmosphere to reduce climate warming by reflecting more incoming solar radiation away from Earth. Research on SCI is growing quickly, but no studies to date have examined the impact of SCI on severe storms using a mesoscale weather model. In this study, we develop a novel framework using the convection-permitting (4-km resolution) Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model to assess the potential impact of SCI on future convective weather over the contiguous United States (CONUS). We conduct three types of simulations for the March–August 2011 period, during which widespread convective outbreaks occurred across the CONUS: (1) a control simulation driven by ERA-5 reanalysis; (2) a Pseudo-Global Warming (PGW) simulation representing a future with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations but without SCI; and (3) a novel Pseudo-SAI (PSAI) simulation representing a future with SCI. Future climate perturbations applied to the PGW and PSAI boundary conditions are derived from ensemble-mean differences between baseline and future scenarios in Community Earth System Model (CESM) experiments with and without SCI. These perturbations are taken from two CESM projects featuring different scenarios: the Geoengineering Large Ensemble (GLENS) and the Assessing Responses and Impacts of Solar Climate Intervention on the Earth System with Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (ARISE). The PSAI simulation includes an additional aerosol optical depth perturbation to represent the shortwave radiative impact of SAI. This paper presents the novel experimental design and modeling framework, and shares preliminary results that highlight the feasibility and scientific potential of this approach for assessing potential weather-scale impacts of SCI. In particular, we show that global warming leads to an increase in extreme precipitation and more frequent deep convection over the Eastern U.S., both of which can be mitigated by SAI deployment.
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Status: open (until 25 Nov 2025)
- CC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3490', Long Cao, 16 Aug 2025 reply
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3490', Chaochao Gao, 29 Sep 2025
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The manuscript titled “Assessing the Impact of Solar Climate Intervention on Future U.S. Weather Using a Convection-Permitting WRF Model” aims to examine the impact of SCI on severe storms over the contiguous United States, by developing a pseudo dynamical downscaling technique and applying it in parallel to the global warming and climate intervention simulations. The methodology is novel in its application and the results are sound. I therefore recommend acceptance of this study after addressing the following issues:
1.Please provide the necessary details about the WRF simulation, for example, how many ensembles are run for each scenarios? Are they all using the same initial boundary conditions? What are the starting and ending date of each ensemble, March to August?
2.Please describe in more detail the pronounced difference between the observations, the CESM, and WRF outputs, i.e., the warming/cooling and drying model biases in your study region (Figure 8 in linking to Figure 4), and discuss how would the difference affect your results.
3.Figure 9, please consider use the log-scale for Y-axis, so that the results are more distinguishable.
4.The region in Figure 10, i.e., the central America is where WRF show strong discrepancy (biases) from either the observation and the CESM results. Please discuss and justify how reliable these results are.
5.Please provide some seasonal breakup results , for example MAM and JJA, especially for the storm activities. Discuss the similarity or difference of SAI mitigation effect, and the potential mechanisms.
6.The use of “March-August 2011” in Table 2 and the caption of Figure 11 may cause unnecessary confusion. Please setup a specific subsection describing this “case study”, by providing comprehensive information about all the storms occurred during this 6-month period, where individual event like the tornado super outbreak occurred, the intensity of these storms, etc. Then come up with a better naming of this “psedo event” under global warming and SAI-mitigated scenarios.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3490-RC1
Data sets
Global Climate Model Model codes for “Assessing the impact of solar climate intervention on future U.S. weather using a convection-permitting model” Lantao Sun https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16374758
WRF data for "Assessing the Impact of Solar Climate Intervention on Future U.S. Weather Using a Convection-Permitting WRF Model" Lantao Sun https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16376739
Data for: Assessing the Impact of Solar Climate Intervention on Future U.S. Weather Using a Convection-Permitting WRF Model Lantao Sun https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16062478
Model code and software
Model codes for "Assessing the Impact of Solar Climate Intervention on Future U.S. Weather Using a Convection-Permitting WRF Model" Lantao Sun https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16374211
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- 1
This study examined potential effect of SAI on future convective storms over the conterminous United States. The authors utilized global climate model (CESM) simulation results of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) to drive the mesoscale regional weather model, WRF. Two sets of ensemble SAI simulation results are used: GLENS and ARISE. The CESM simulated climate change are added to ERA5 data to drive WRF with a horizonal resolution of 4km. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that only a few studies examined the effect of SAI on the thermodynamic environments relevant to weather pattern, and no studies have examined how SAI would affect mesoscale weather using a convective permitting weather model. This study found that SAI could mitigate warming, extreme precipitation, and intense convective activities. I recommend publication after the following comments are addressed:
Lines 35-38: It might not be appropriate to emphasize a single country’s policy in a scientific paper that is not devoted to policy discussion.
Lines 51-52: It would be helpful to briefly describe the experiment design and strategy for GeoMIP and GLENS simulations. This is important because all climate response to SAI would be dependent on the SAI strategy.
Lines 70-77: It’s a bit unconventional to have a ‘result’ figure (Figure. 1) in the Introduction part.
Line 103: What is ‘delta signal’ ? This should be elaborated more.
Lines 104-105: “This results in future thermodynamic environments for the same weather events simulated in the control run.” I don’t quite understand this sentence. Please rephrase.
Line 191: What is the horizonal resolution for ERA5 reanalysis and ARISE and GLENS output? I believe some data interpolation have been done before adding simulated climate change signal to ERA5. This information would be useful.
Line 206: How to modify relative humidity? Please explain
Line 276: Stratospheric aerosol absorb infrared and longwave radiation.
Line 366: What is ‘RR’ in equations (1) and (2)?