CLIMATE AND EARTH
SYSTEM SCIENCES
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
1 November 2022
Photo: private
We are proud to announce the successful MSc thesis presentation of our SICSS member Smriti Sheoran
Her thesis "A joint integrated assessment of mitigation and solar radiation management susceptible to India’s climate" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Hermann Held (Research Unit Sustainability and Climate Risks - Universität Hamburg) and Prof. Dr. Andreas Lange (Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability - Universität Hamburg).
Smriti investigated whether solar radiation management (SRM) has the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change and lower global mean temperatures. Her goal was to investigate how SRM can benefit individuals or groups of countries as a potential climate policy option. She calculated the cost and impact of SRM as a joint-mitigation solution on climate conditions using the MIND-FaIR model in a cost-effective framework. To compare model results, she conducted an analytic study of temperature and precipitation changes in SRM regions. She discovered that a joint mitigation-SRM policy option could be proposed for maintaining the global mean temperature target while saving India and '14' other regions from the risk of precipitation. According to her analysis, SRM undercompensates for precipitation in Brazil, with the overall shift in regional precipitation dominated by decreased precipitation, with '5' other regions remaining within the safe bound. Another interesting finding was for BGE losses: in the absence of SRM, she calculated that BGE losses are 1.020355% higher than in the BAU scenario. SRM provides an incentive for both countries, reducing BGE loss in India by 0.00174% and in Brazil by 0.08422%. Furthermore, she discovered in the literature that the global extreme precipitation scaling coefficient is nearly twice as large as the global mean precipitation scaling coefficient. She wants to highlight the importance of extreme precipitation scaling for regions and SRM in her thesis work through her findings, and that research focusing on SRM as a policy option takes the effects of extreme precipitation into account by using the scaling coefficients.
Smriti’s future plans?
Smriti is a zealous supporter of sustainable development and wants to work with environmental-friendly organizations to help them achieve net zero.