Randy Ligh, age 12, of Berkeley, Calif.,for his question:

What happens in the stratosphere?

In 1964 60,000 scientists from 66 nations  gathered an ocean of facts. This happened in the IGY when the world was given a physical check up of its land, sea and air

Balloons were invented by the French in the 1700s. Mountain climbers, of course, have always known that the higher you go the colder it gets .. and in 1804, a French balloonist confirmed this fact, The Paris he left behind was a sweltering 84 degrees but as he rose to 23,000 feet the temperature steadily dropped to 15 degrees.

The first probing showed the air above the weathery troposphere to be calm and dry and very cold, The experts figured that 20 miles up the temperature must be absolute zero and then concluded that this point must be the top of the atmosphere. They were wrong. Later probings revealed that the temperature aloft finally levels off and sometimes it even rises.

In the 1890, the probers grasped the scope of the stratosphere. They knew it was a layer of air very different in character from the weathery troposphere below it. At the equator it begins about twelve miles up and slopes down gradually to about four miles above the poles,

The methods of probing the upper air continued and improved. In 1926, fierce breezes were found in the stratosphere, but most people still thought of it as a region of calm, separated from the troposphere by a floor of air called the tropopause. In World War II, thosoierce breezes were rediscovered and became well known to high flying pilots as the jet streams.

During the IGY, the stratosphere was probed from any stations dotted all over the world. But its scope is so large that all these probings are but samplings. There are changing wind systems in the stratosphere and points where the air descends down to the earth. The temperature aloft varies from place to place and from time to time. But so far we do not have enough facts to assemble a total picture of what happens in the stratosphere.

We now know that the stratosphere is not a calm, dry, cold layer of air separated from the troposphere layer below it. And some of the IGY probes suggested that what goes on in the stratosphere may bring about changes in our weather. Probes are now being done by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and when we learn what happens in the stratosphere we may have a better idea of why our changeable weather behaves as it does.