New Platforms for Solar Radiation Management Science

Atmospheric aerosols have a direct impact on Earth’s radiative balance through scattering and absorption of sunlight and an indirect impact through their feedback on cloud optical properties and lifetimes. Solar radiation management (SRM) strategies propose to tilt Earth’s radiative forcing by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to scatter solar radiation or modify global cloud fields. Modeling of SRM strategies remains highly uncertain, and — as SRM field campaigns are challenging and/or impossible — reducing these uncertainties requires next-generation laboratory experiments. In this effort, we are using a single-particle spectrometer to study light-scattering and microphysics for aerosol particles of known composition and a stratospheric chamber to perform both ensemble and single particle experiments at low temperatures. In parallel, we will perform mesoscale modeling to understand the microphysicochemical links between single-particle properties and collective effects. Leveraging these platforms, we will tackle key research questions that underpin the efficacy and safety of SRM strategies, with an emphasis on stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). We are particularly interested in studying (a) the influence of atmospheric processing on optical properties of SAI particles, (b) the effects of aerosol polydispersity and agglomeration on the optical and microphysical properties relevant to SAI, and (c) the propensities for SAI particles to nucleate ice crystals as they settle into the upper troposphere or travel to higher latitudes. Our results will ultimately inform global climate models and predictions of SRM scenarios.

Marissa L. Weichman is an assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton University. She is an experimental physical chemist whose interests lie broadly in using interactions with light to probe, understand, and control the behavior of complex chemical systems, including atmospheric aerosols. Weichman obtained her B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2012 and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. She carried out postdoctoral research at JILA/University of Colorado Boulder and began her independent career at Princeton in July 2020. Her group’s work has been recognized with a 2022 Department of Energy Early Career award, 2023 NSF CAREER award, a 2023 Packard Foundation fellowship, a 2024 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and a 2025 Cottrell Scholar Award.

Luc Deike is an associate professor in the Princeton University Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Deike joined the Princeton faculty in winter 2017, coming from the University of California, San Diego, where he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 2013 to 2016. Deike received his Ph.D. from the University Paris Diderot in 2013 and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2019 the François Frenkiel award from the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in 2023 and then the McGraw Graduate Mentoring Award from the Princeton University Graduate School and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in 2023. His research focuses on fundamental fluid dynamics with an emphasis on multi-scale systems, motivated by their importance in environmental and industrial applications, including ocean-atmosphere interactions, aerosol science, and multi-phase turbulent flows.

Michael E. Mueller is the associate chair and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University. Since 2020, he has been jointly appointed as a faculty researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and he is currently editor of the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. He received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 2009 and 2012, respectively. His research interests encompass computational modeling of multi-physics turbulent flows with applications to energy, propulsion, and the environment as well as broader areas of computational and data sciences. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Among other awards and recognitions for his research, he has received the Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award from the Combustion Institute and the Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Army Research Office. He has also received the Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award and been named to the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching in twelve semesters.