A Vintage Warplane Is Scouting for Clues That Geoengineering Could Actually Work. (5/5/2023).

Solar geoengineering is a controversial proposed strategy to block sunlight from reaching Earth in order to slow down climate change. One of the leading geoengineering ideas involves adding reflective particles to the stratosphere. But before humanity makes any more big changes to our atmosphere, it would probably be a good idea to try to understand it. At least, that’s the idea behind a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission involving a retrofitted bomber aircraft from the 1950s.
On March 27, NOAA concluded the first leg of its SABRE (stratospheric aerosol processes, budget, and radiative effects) project. Through the mission, the agency aims to make a dent in the dearth of data we have on Earth’s stratosphere, in hopes of resolving some big lingering mysteries.
For one, federal researchers want to get a better idea of how much rocket launches alter the stratosphere. Another question: What proportion of what’s floating around up there comes from meteorites? How are worsening wildfires changing things? Then, there’s an even bigger, overarching puzzle. NOAA is trying to find out, one way or the other, if deeply controversial proposals to geoengineer the atmosphere are a good idea or not.

“SABRE is happening because we want to have a baseline of the stratosphere,” Gregory Frost, a NOAA atmospheric and climate scientist and program manager, told Gizmodo in a March phone call. The last time there was a large, federally funded campaign to assess the upper atmosphere was about 20 years ago, Frost explained. In the interim, there’ve been lower-resolution satellite observations, “but they’re not very specific,” he added.

“It’s been a long time, so we wanted to go back. Technology is improved and our instruments are a lot better. We’re able to measure things we couldn’t measure before.”