The troposphere is not cooling. it is getting warmer. the stratosphere, however is cooling.
It's, of course, harder to measure the temperature in the stratosphere than in the troposphere where we have a network of measurement stations. Stratospheric temperature measurements do exist. They have been made using weather balloons, microwave sounding units, rocketsondes, LIDAR and satellites. Most of these readings only go back two or three decades at most and there are large uncertainities associated with the data. The lower stratosphere appears to be cooling by about 0.5°C per decade.
Troposphere holds in heat when O3 gets depleted, Stratosphere cools because it lets go of the heat.
We now know that stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming are intimately connected and that carbon dioxide plays a part in both processes. At present, however, our understanding of stratospheric cooling is not complete and further research has to be done. We do, however, already know that observed and predicted cooling in the stratosphere makes the formation of an Arctic ozone hole more likely.
2007-09-06 22:38:15
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answer #1
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answered by Kristenite’s Back! 7
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