Geoengineering Projects Could Lead To Reduction In Rainfall, Say Scientists

An international team of scientists has found that geoengineering projects could lead to less rainfall in Europe and North America.

Geoengineering is a method used to tackle global warming or climate change. Scientists released huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the earth's atmosphere to reduce the solar radiation from reaching the earth's surface.

Sulphur dioxide acts as huge mirrors in space reflecting solar radiation before it could reach earth. As a result it acts as a tool to control and halt global warming.

Scientists found that the method which is used to combat global warming is actually reducing rainfall. They discovered this when they were analysing four earth models. These models showed as to how earth responded to climate engineering under a specific scenario.

"A quadrupling of CO2 is at the upper end, but still in the range of what is considered possible at the end of the 21st century," said Hauke Schmidt, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in a statement.

The study found that geoengineering projects reduce rainfall by about 15 percent (some 100 millimetres of rain per year) of preindustrial precipitation values in large areas of North America and northern Eurasia. Over central South America, all models show a decrease in rainfall that reaches more than 20 percent in parts of the Amazon region. Other tropical regions see similar changes, both negative and positive.

Overall, global rainfall is reduced by about five percent on average in all four models studied.

"The impacts of these changes are yet to be addressed, but the main message is that the climate produced by geoengineering is different to any earlier climate even if the global mean temperature of an earlier climate might be reproduced," said Schmidt.

Scientists claim further studies are required to know the geo engineering and its effects on the climate.

"This study is the first clean comparison of different models following a strict simulation protocol, allowing us to estimate the robustness of the results. Additionally we are using the newest breed of climate models, the ones that will provide results for the Fifth IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Report," explains Schmidt.

The study was first published in Earth System Dynamics, an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU)