Stratospheric Aerosol Intervention experiment for the Chemistry–Climate Model Initiative

A new Stratospheric Aerosol Intervention (SAI) experiment has been designed for the Chemistry–Climate Model Initiative (CCMI-2022) to assess the impacts of SAI on stratospheric chemistry and dynamical responses and inter-model differences using a constrained setup with a prescribed stratospheric aerosol distribution and fixed sea surface temperatures and sea ice. This paper serves a dual purpose: first, it describes the details of the experimental setup and the prescribed aerosol distribution and demonstrates the suitability of the simplified setup to study SAI impacts in the stratosphere in a multi-model framework. The experiment allows attributing inter-model differences to the resulting impacts on atmospheric chemistry, radiation, and dynamics rather than the model uncertainty arising from differences in aerosol forcing and feedbacks from the ocean and sea ice under SAI. Second, we use the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM6) to compare the interactive stratospheric aerosol configuration with coupling to land, ocean, and sea ice used to produce the stratospheric aerosol distribution with the results of the constrained SAI experiment. With this, we identify and isolate the stratosphere-controlled SAI-induced impacts from those influenced by the coupling with the ocean. Overall, this comparison facilitates an advanced process-level understanding of the drivers of SAI-induced atmospheric responses. For example, we confirm earlier suggestions that the SAI-induced positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation in winter, with the corresponding winter warming over Eurasia and related changes, is driven by stratosphere–troposphere coupling. Future multi-model comparisons will thus provide an important contribution to upcoming scientific assessments of ozone depletion.