As the only airborne cloud research platform holder in Eastern Europe, INCAS is in the perfect position to be a well-known R&D organisation that obtain urgently needed data sets, process and interpret them in order to improve future climate projections. However, to date, a lack of presenting these capabilities has left INCAS too little known in the cloud research community and therefore, underutilized research partner with excellent and very useful facilities. Through the BRACE-MY project, INCAS team will obtain the required skills and an additional equipment needed to complement their research capabilities with state-of-the art aerosol sampling techniques. The foreseen research, conducted in conjunction with strong twinning activities will transfer the skills required for INCAS to perform aerosol-cloud interaction research and elevate its reputation to that of a leader in the cloud and aerosol community. This will be achieved by using a “learning by doing” approach to transfer the best practices for conducting research, disseminating results and educating young scientists from the world-class project partners to INCAS. In particular, this will include: the development of an ice nucleating particle counter based on a state-of-the-art aerosol sampling system provided by a project partner, conducting research flights, publishing and presenting research results within internationally recognized platforms, organizing and lecturing at summer schools designed for upcoming researcher in the field and gaining the managerial skills required to become a recognized partner for aerosol and cloud microphysics research. The project partners have been selected to ensure that all of the objectives are guided by leaders in the field of aerosol and cloud research and acting as a research provider. Therefore, BRACE-MY will give INCAS, a research institute in a “widening country”, the opportunity to elevate itself to an internationally recognized cloud and aerosol research institute.

The importance of understanding and monitoring atmospheric physics has increased drastically in recent years due to the anthropogenic impact on climate. One crucial research field is the understanding of wind and temperature distributions in the atmosphere to enhance climate models and improve weather forecasts. There is currently a major data gap for continuous measurements above 5 km, which is the maximum height of commercial compact wind radars and lidars. The goal of EULIAA is the development of a lidar array measuring autonomously the atmospheric wind and temperature from 5 km up to 50 km on a 24/7-basis over a long period of time (> 1 year without maintenance) and covering a large observation area (up to 10’000 km2). EULIAA’s lidar units are low-priced, compact, efficient, easily transportable, and autonomous thanks to low power requirements (by wind turbines or solar panels). EULIAA will yield novel data sets in near real-time for implementation into European databases Copernicus and GEOSS, that will fill current data-gaps and help to monitor the effects of climate change and to evaluate climate protection measures. The baseline technology was demonstrated in the first field campaign with a lidar system that operates in the IR and is currently being transferred to a European industrial partner. Once the enhanced capability developed within EULIAA has been demonstrated and validated in difficult-to-reach regions (polar, equatorial, and mountain), with a high TRL (6–8), a business plan and roadmap for an European array will be produced, involving relevant industrial, standardisation, and end-user actors. The EULIAA project (48 months and 3M€ grant requested) gathers 7 partners from 5 countries with experts in lidar and its subsystems, atmospheric observatories, and atmospheric data provider. It contains all the necessary disciplines to ensure the technological development, data transfer, and sustainable exploitation.