Long-Range Smoke Transport: Monitoring with the New European Automatic Lidar Network—E-PROFILE

E-PROFILE is a new network integrating hundreds of Automatic Lidars and Ceilometers (ALCs) with profiling capabilities across Europe. These state of the art ceilometers have the capability to do vertical profiling of aerosols including volcanic ash [e.g. Flentje et al 2010, Martucci et al. 2011], but also of smoke from large-scale biomass burning or dust advected from the Sahara region.

In August 2018 already 215 instruments from 17 countries were operational in E-PROFILE and more than 300 are expected for the end of the year. This network primarily provides vertical profiles of attenuated backscatter coefficient and complements existing networks of high performance research lidars, bringing a high-density network of instruments and continuous real-time data availability. It thus significantly enhances the capabilities of the current observing system to detect volcanic ash and other aerosol types like smoke.

In a tight collaboration between EUMETNET/E-PROFILE, COST/TOPROF and the industry, state-of-the-art ALCs have been characterized establishing a good understanding of the instrument output. Correction algorithms and recommendations for instrument operation have been developed to improve data quality and consistency. Finally, the liquid cloud and Rayleigh calibration methods were implemented to calibrate ALCs in an automatic and unattended manner.

With the capacity of being a dense network of continuous observations, E-PROFILE is contributing to the European H2020 project EUNADICS-AV. The aim of this project is to establish an early warning system and provide detailed now-casting information for the aviation industry in the event of airborne hazards. Among others, these can be ash clouds from volcanic eruptions, outbreaks of Saharan dust or the presence of smoke from large-scale biomass burning which can trigger emergency landings of commercial airplanes.

We will give a detailed description of the network architecture, the calibration algorithms and the benefits of the ALC. Further, case studies of atmospheric events of interest will be presented.

On the one hand, we will show measurements of intense smoke transport. We will focus on the storm Ophelia in October 2017. The large amount of smoke, even after been transported on thousands of kilometers (from Portugal to UK), forced several planes to land in emergency.

On the other hand, we will also demonstrate the performance of E-PROFILE for measuring smoke after very long transport. We will show several example of Canadian smoke transported to Europe. First characteristics of these long-range transports will be established.

To conclude, this presentation will show the added-value of the first ground-based network with such an high number of aerosol profilers.