EULIAA : novel compact lidar systems for operational wind, temperature and aerosol measurements between 5 and 50 km altitude

As of today, there is a significant technological gap for continuous temperature and wind measurements at altitudes above 5 km, which is the maximum altitude reached by compact commercial lidar and radar wind profilers. Measuring higher up is not only crucial to better understand atmospheric dynamics and couplings and enhance climate models, but is also anticipated to bring substantial benefits for middle-range weather forecasting. The Horizon Europe project EULIAA aims to help close this gap with novel daylight-capable UV Doppler lidars with multiple fields of view to measure 3D-wind, temperature and aerosols from 5 to 50 km altitude at least. Within this range, the measurements shall have a high resolution and accuracy, compliant with WMO requirements. The instruments will be low-priced, highly autonomous (> 1 year without maintenance), compact (1m³), and with low power consumption, which opens up possibilities for deployment in remote and/or extreme environments. A high technological readiness level (TRL 6-8) is foreseen at the end of the project, which paves the way for operational deployments. The data processing is designed in a way which will eventually allow to use multiple lidar units with overlapping measurement regions as an array covering a large area.

With this contribution, we will give an overview of the instruments and show the current status of the project after 2.5 years duration. We will outline the upcoming campaigns in various latitudes and environments, including polar and subtropical regions; during these deployments, existing infrastructure such as remote sensing instruments and radiosondes will be used for validation. First observations of a EULIAA lidar unit will be presented, which will emphasize their possible interest for different application areas in meteorology and climatology. Finally, we will present our data pipeline and the plan for the near real-time dissemination of the measurement data on different platforms.