Detecting changes in global extremes under the GLENS-SAI climate
intervention strategy
Abstract
As anthropogenic activities continue to drive increases in extreme
events, the fundamental solution of reducing greenhouse gas emissions
remains elusive. Thus, there is growing interest in stratospheric
aerosol injection (SAI) to offset some of the most dangerous
consequences of climate change. If SAI was deployed at a global scale,
it would likely be easy to detect by some metrics. However, the
detectability of SAI on extreme events might be more difficult, given
the presence of natural climate variability. We examine this question in
climate model simulations of SAI. Specifically, we train a logistic
regression model to predict whether a map of global extremes came from
climate simulations with or without SAI. The timing of accurate
predictions is a quantification of the time to detection of SAI impacts.
We find that regional changes in extreme temperature and precipitation
are robustly detected within 1 and 15 years of initial SAI injection,
respectively.