Most pulverized coal combustion processes are high temperature (2000--2200 K) operations. The objective of this work was to investigate the potential calcium based sorbents for sulfur removal from high temperature gases (1600--2400 K) under transient thermal nonequilibrium conditions. In a bench scale apparatus, the transient heat up and reactions of sorbent particles in high temperature sulfur laden reactions background gas was monitored for time scales less than 100 ms. 17 refs., 43 figs.