The assimilation technique in MERRA-2 imposes an additional forcing, the analysis tendency, to force the GEOS model towards the observations. This additional forcing can often be regarded as a compensation for inadequacies in the representation of processes in the model, and can manifest as either random error (with a complex spatial structure) or as a mean bias, with a coherent spatio-temporal structure. Because the GEOS model uses climatological water vapor fields in the stratosphere of MERRA-2, any anomalous radiative forcing caused by the volcanic eruption will not be captured in the radiative tendencies, and will instead by captured by the bias in the analysis tendency term. The global analysis temperature tendencies at 20hPa, shown for each month of MERRA-2 (Fig. 1a), reveals the anomalous values seen in 2022. Cooling by the increments is below average in January 2022, one of the strongest cooling years in February, and lies well below the average in March through June. In May 2022 the cooling is over three standard deviations below the mean. These anomalies at 20 hPa coincide with the peak moisture anomaly isolated in Millán et al. (2022), are the largest in MERRA-2. The increments show weaker additional cooling at 10hPa and weak additional warming at 30hPa (not shown).