The European E-PROFILE network of automatic lidars and ceilometers for the monitoring of clouds, aerosols and volcanic ash

Modern ceilometers now have the capability to provide profiles of aerosols including volcanic ash. This new measurement capability of ceilometers, combined with their low cost and high reliability, offers a great potential to enhance the current observation capabilities of aerosols and volcanic ash. E-PROFILE is a measurement program of EUMETNET, the network of European meteorological services, that was initiated by the COST action EG-CLIMET in response to the major Icelandic volcanic eruptions in 2010 and 2011. It is the continuation of the operational radar windprofiler network E-WINPROF which provides vertical wind profiles from 30 European stations and 11 stations located outside of Europe. The objective of E-PROFILE is to integrate the approximately 700 ceilometers and automatic lidars of the 19 member states into a European network providing vertical backscatter profiles for the monitoring of clouds, aerosols and volcanic ash. Initiating this ambitious plan requires that a standardized calibration procedure be developed in collaboration with the COST action TO-PROF to provide aerosol profile information in a homogeneous manner across the network. The measurements will be distributed in real time and a visualization tool of the results on an interactive web page will be developed. We will give a detailed description of E-PROFILE and report on the current state of the development of the network integration and of the retrieval algorithms necessary to monitor clouds , aerosols and volcanic ash.