Here's the stratosphere cooler.

You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there.

So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes.

We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem.

The National Mesosphere Stratosphere Troposphere Radar Facility set up near Tirupati in southern India is helping atmospheric researchers.

To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year.

You can dive into the stratosphere, and precisely dissipate that velocity, and come back out to the space station.

Even though regulations will phase out the production of chlorofluorocarbons in the future, the removal of chlorine from the stratosphere is a very slow process (taking decades or centuries), and stratospheric chlorine will continue to increase for at least the next few years, as chlorine already released into the lower atmosphere reaches the stratosphere.

This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km.

You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles sulfates into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet.

Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb like cloud.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, about a million tons of sulfur dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe, and by scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight cooled the earth s surface for almost two years. We could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosol insertion essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, about a million tons of sulfur dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe, and by scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight cooled the earth s surface for almost two years. We could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosol insertion essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere.

In that regard it should be noted that annual variations in the depth, size and persistence of the ozone hole depend significantly on changing meteorological conditions in the stratosphere.

I was there to view something called a long duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up.

The campaign obtained important information on midocean storms and generation, propagation, and filtering of gravity waves in the mesosphere and stratosphere. This should lead to better parameterization of gravity waves in global circulation models.

Models suggest that the minimum ozone concentration in the stratosphere above Antarctica will occur prior to 2010 and that recovery to 1980 levels may be expected in the middle of the twenty first century.

This makes its ozone depletion potential very dependent on both the latitude of emissions (relative to the tropical tropopause where trace gases enter the stratosphere) and on the season in which the emissions take place.

Now, the skeptics say, Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun. If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in.

They do so with good reason. Consider the potential effects of a 50 megaton nuclear explosion, similar to the Tsar Bomba, detonated in October 1961, which shattered windows 900 kilometers (560 miles) away and sent a mushroom cloud rising above the stratosphere.

According to the Royal Society in Britain, releasing sulfur particles into the stratosphere would probably be the most cost effective method. But our goal should be to avoid such a hazardous enterprise, which future generations would have to continue for hundreds of years.

The idea behind this form of geoengineering as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet.

REYKJAVIK No one yet has any real idea about when the global financial crisis will end, but one thing is certain government budget deficits are headed into the stratosphere. Investors in the coming years will need to be persuaded to hold mountains of new debt.

Consequently, studies are being carried out in both polar regions, including on the role of ice and frozen ground in climate change (the Climate and Cryosphere Project) the shape of Earth, or the geoid the polar electromagnetic fields and variations in the concentration of ozone in the stratosphere.

While a quartz watch keeps time more accurately than the most finely crafted handmade mechanical Swiss watch, the value of a quartz watch has plummeted, while Swiss watches value has climbed into the stratosphere. Even though they are virtually indistinguishable in appearance, people seem to cherish the knowledge that someone has lovingly crafted their watch.

These agreements are hailed as great successes, and annual reports summarizing official statistics are published showing that the use of CFC continues to decrease. The content of chlorine (from decay of CFC s) in the stratosphere has leveled off, and two years ago the ozone hole over the Antarctic was the smallest in decades (and broken up into two).

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has suggested another solution manipulate the climate by releasing white sulfur particles high up in the stratosphere, where they would remain for several years, exerting a proven cooling effect on Earth s climate without affecting human health. In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines created a haze of sulfur in the higher atmosphere that cooled the entire planet approximately half a degree Celsius for two years afterwards.