Ebook: The Stratosphere: Phenomena, History, and Relevance

This book is intended not only for meteorologists but also for scientists in other fields, for teachers, and for interested lay persons who do not want to acquaint themselves with its topics through an academic textbook. In addition to painting a picture of the stratosphere, we want to show how the approach to an understanding of Nature's complex structure of tell is along; winding, unexpected paths. At the beginning of the 20th century observations were accumulating which were essential to understanding climate and its variability. but they could not be treated systematically because important links were missing. among them the realization that there is a stratosphere or an ozone layer. When, however, one reads the scientific papers from the turn of the century and judges them on the basis of our present knowledge --which llndoubtedlr is still incomplete - one must admire the early workers in this field for the care and imagination with which they approached the subject. The discoveries we describe in this book have been important to the progress of meteorology; and it is apposite here to quote Kuhn (1962) on the course science normally takes after a discovery.

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This book describes the discovery of the stratosphere itself and of various unexpected phenomena in the stratosphere: e.g., a manned balloon flight in 1901 as high as 11 km; an expedition to Lake Victoria in Africa in 1908 which found inexplicable west winds in the stratosphere above the equator; and the discovery of the ozone layer in the 1930s, the Berlin Phenomenon in 1952, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in 1960, the influence of volcanic eruptions in 1970, the ozone hole in 1984, and the influence of the 11-year solar cycle in 1987. The book also describes how these phenomena are connected with each other and how they create variability in the climate system, in addition to man-made changes, such as the decrease in ozone. We use the stratosphere as one example of Nature's complexity and of how often discoveries are ignored because they do not fit prevalent concepts.