***Note: Venue changed to Pick Hall 022!***
Join us for a Lunch & Learn with Jessica Wan, Research Associate at the Climate Systems Engineering initiative.
Lunch is provided.
Abstract
Title: Can we geoengineer clouds to mitigate heatwaves?
Abstract: Solar geoengineering (SG) was originally proposed as a way to increase the amount sunlight reflected to space in order to reduce the effects of long-term warming. Marine cloud brightening (MCB) is one SG proposal to inject sea spray into the lower atmosphere to form brighter clouds over the ocean to cool the Earth’s surface. While modeling studies have demonstrated that SG, from a physical science perspective, can reduce some of the worst climate change impacts, there remain many sociotechnical barriers to sustained deployment. Recent work has begun exploring the viability of shorter-term SG interventions to target seasonal-to-multiyear events such as El Niño. Here, we investigate for the first time the efficacy of regional SG interventions to target specific extreme weather events on even shorter timescales. We train a state-of-the-art AI weather emulator– 100,000 times faster than a conventional numerical weather prediction model– with historical daily mean reanalysis cloud data from 1979 to 2018. This approach allows exhaustive sampling on intervention space and corresponding weather trajectories. For this proof-of-concept case study, our objective is to weaken or divert the record-breaking 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave through a series of idealized MCB perturbations in the days preceding the extreme event.