Data to evaluate the regional impacts of stratospheric aerosol injection

[Geoengineering News]

https://carbonplan.org/research/sai-downscaling-explainer

Authors: Claire Zarakas, Freya Chay, Oriana Chegwidden, Anderson Banihirwe, Raphael Hagen, Grayson Badgley, Brendan Clark, Temitope S. Egbebiyi, Daniele Visioni

28 September 2026

Recently, there’s been a marked uptick in activity around solar radiation modification — a family of approaches that aims to reduce global warming by reflecting sunlight back into space. Much of that activity, including growing private investment, centers on one method in particular: stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). 

As interest in SAI grows, so does the urgency for research that supports public scrutiny and informed decision-making. We need to understand the disparate ways SAI could affect people, plants, animals, and ecosystems to inform if and how these approaches should evolve. But that analysis requires climate data at a finer spatial resolution than global climate models provide.

That’s where downscaling comes in. Downscaling translates coarse-resolution climate model output into a finer-resolution form that can be used by impact modelers. But it’s not a straightforward process. There are many ways to downscale data, and small methodological choices can change your results.

We’re releasing an open-source, downscaled SAI dataset. We worked with partners at Cornell University, The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering (DSG), and The Degrees Initiative to design and execute a downscaling project informed by, and accessible to, researchers worldwide. The result applies two downscaling methods to output from two climate models. We're also openly releasing the code used to produce and validate the data.

We hope this enables researchers across the globe to explore the regional impacts that matter to them, provides a benchmark for independent downscaling efforts, and lays the foundation for more systematic research into how downscaling itself introduces uncertainty into our understanding of SAI impacts.

Technical explainer: https://carbonplan.org/research/sai-downscaling-explainer

Governance white paper: https://www.sgdeliberation.org/dsg-publications/downscaling-srm-scenarios

Data: https://source.coop/carbonplan/srm-downscaling 

Code: https://github.com/carbonplan/sai-downscaling

Source: CarbonPlan