Tag Archives: stratosphere

Employing commercial aircraft to inject sulphur into the stratosphere is not a viable strategy, according to Finnish researchers. Even if planes flew at higher altitudes and emitted ten times the current legal limit of sulphur, the cooling effect would be lower than if the same amount of sulphur was injected over the tropics. “Using commercial aircraft for sulphur injection would demand unrealistic scenarios to cause significant radiative forcing and thus cooling,” Anton Laakso of the Finnish Meteorological Institute told environmentalresearchweb. “It would require enhancement of fuel sulphur concentration clearly over our current legal limits and lifting the flight paths of practically all intercontinental flights to the stratosphere – which the current type of aircraft can do only in the polar regions.” Even if all this were possible, Laakso said that, because current air traffic is concentrated in northern mid-latitudes, the strategy would lead to unbalanced forcing between the northern and southern …