One of the best things about sitting in a window seat during a daytime flight is when the aircraft researches the stratosphere.
Flink4 is an Apache project built on the Stratosphere research prototype [5] developed at the Technische Universität of Berlin.
Funding has also helped support scientific meetings in geoengineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Edinburgh, Scotland, and aeronautics research related to altering the stratosphere.
Until recently, the only way scientists could collect "chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles," or comet dust, without going to space has been by flying research planes high in the stratosphere.
The chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles (CP IDPs), fragments of asteroids and comets collected by NASA high-altitude research aircraft from the Earth's stratosphere, are recognized as the least altered samples of the original dust of the Solar Nebula available for laboratory examination.
"It is predicted there will be more and more incidents of severe clear-air turbulence, which typically comes out of the blue with no warning, occurring in the near future as climate change takes its effect in the stratosphere," Dr Paul Williams, a Royal Society research fellow at Reading University, said last week.
In 1985, the identification of significant depletion of ozone in the Antarctic stratosphere focused attention on stratospheric chemistry and the susceptibility of the stratosphere to modification.
Already, research has demonstrated that injecting sulphur into the stratosphere is relatively cheap, and is instantly effective at cooling the Earth's surface.
The findings were based on sound science, Dr. Anderson and other experts said, but much more research is needed, including direct measurements in the stratosphere in areas where water vapor was present after storms.
Their research showed that when CFC's float to the stratosphere, powerful ultraviolet rays peel away a chlorine atom that can destroy 100,000 ozone molecules.
That took me through a whole stratosphere of possibilities, and doing a little research and discovering that the M is mercury.
