News

EULIAA partners MeteoSwiss and IAP participated in the D·A·CH 2025 conference in Bern, hosted by the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern.
The conference brings together experts from academia, industry and administration across all fields of weather and climate.

At this high‑profile meeting, EULIAA partners presented project status and early results, introducing the novel lidar technology for high‑resolution profiles of wind, temperature and aerosols and discussing its relevance for operational meteorological services in the DACH region.

Gerd Baumgarten (Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, IAP) represented the EULIAA project at ESA’s Zero Debris Week, organised by ESA Space Safety at ESOC. The event brought together launcher companies, operators, agencies, NGOs and academia to advance the “Zero Debris” agenda and the next edition of the Zero Debris Technical Booklet.

At the meeting, EULIAA’s lidar technology was presented as a tool capable of detecting residues of burnt‑up space debris in the upper atmosphere. While the environmental impact of re‑entering debris is gaining attention, it is still not widely considered in the broader community. EULIAA’s contribution helped raise awareness of this issue and demonstrated how advanced atmospheric lidar measurements can support a more sustainable use of space.

The EULIAA consortium held a project review meeting at Fraunhofer ILT in Aachen, Germany, with additional participants joining online.
EULIAA, funded by the European Commission, aims to develop and demonstrate an advanced atmospheric lidar to provide key data for monitoring climate change.

During the meeting, partners presented substantial progress and results across lidar system design, laser development, optical coatings and data processing. Despite very ambitious goals, the project remains on track and has even revealed additional potential beyond the original plans – including a clear prospect of achieving “first light” with the new lidar at the beginning of the following year.

The consortium expressed its thanks for the strong efforts of all partners and the valuable guidance from Advisory Board members Frank Lison, Bernhard Stein and Jens Löhring, as well as project officer Lara Congiu and reviewers David Riaño and Peter North.

This year we started our new EU-funded project EULIAA: European Lidar Array for Atmospheric Climate Monitoring with our hybrid kickoff meeting online and in Aachen.

Within the project the partners Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT, Leibniz-Institut für Atmosphärenphysik IAP, Altechna, Andøya Space, Bundesamt für Meteorologie und Klimatologie MeteoSchweiz, LATMOS Laboratoire Atmosphères, Observations Spatiales and GordienStrato will develop novel mobile ground-based lidar systems that can operate in an array over large areas, demonstrate the performance in extensive field campaigns all over Europe and feed the atmospheric data in near real-time in the European database like COPERNICUS and GEOSS.

We are a great consortium with many experts in all the relevant fields and eager to approach the challenge of such an ambitious technology. We are thankful to the European Commission for their trust in us and the opportunity to push the development for closing gaps in environmental data to monitor climate change.

Participating experts of the hybrid kickoff meeting - online and in Aachen.