On This Day in Science History - November 5 - Léon Teisserenc de Bort

November 5th is L?on Teisserenc de Bort's birthday. He was a French meteorologist best known for the discovery of the layer in the atmosphere known as the stratosphere. He was a pioneer of the unmanned weather balloons carrying instruments to collect and record data such as temperature, pressure and wind speed. Typically, as you increase altitude, the temperature falls rather quickly. He discovered a boundary layer of the atmosphere approximately 7 miles up where the temperature would stop decreasing and would remain constant as the altitude increased. He concluded there were two regions of the atmosphere. The first 7 miles was called the troposphere ("sphere of change" in Greek) where the weather was constantly changing and stirring up the different gases in air because of the temperature differences in the air. After 7 miles, he reasoned the gases in the air would layer themselves, heaviest to lightest in strata. He named this section the stratosphere.

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