Four-dimensional distribution of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic cloud over Europe observed by EARLINET: Eyja2010 EARLINET Relational database request

A relational database, containing the output of the 4D analysis of EARLINET data related to the volcanic eruption of 2010, has been set up. The full Eyja2010 MySQL database is freely available and can be obtained sending a request by e-mail to: gelsomina.pappalardo@imaa.cnr.it.

 

The e-mail should report as subject:

“Eyja2010 EARLINET Relational database request”

and should contain the following mandatory information:

  1. full name
  2. complete affiliation
  3. e-mail to use for sending the compressed database file
  4. phone number

A database zip archive containing the full dump of the earlinet_eyja2010 database together with a readme file for instruction will be sent by e-mail to the specified address within few days from the request. The size of the zip archive is about 100KB.

 

Eyjafjallajökull 2010 – EARLINET 4D volcanic particles distribution

During the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in April–May 2010, almost all the EARLINET stations promptly started continuous measurements, whenever weather conditions allowed it. Despite the fact that EARLINET stations are not truly operational, the lidar systems were run almost continuously, weather permitting, coordinated by daily alerts.

For the first time, quantitative data about the presence, altitude, and layering of the volcanic cloud, in conjunction with optical information, are available for most parts of Europe derived from the EARLINET observations. Based on multi-wavelength Raman lidar systems, EARLINET is the only instrument worldwide that is able to provide dense time series of high-quality optical data to be used for aerosol typing and for the retrieval of particle microphysical properties as a function of altitude.

The four-dimensional (4-D) distribution of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic cloud in the troposphere over Europe as observed by EARLINET during the entire volcanic event (15 April–26 May 2010) was investigated thanks to the optical properties directly measured (backscatter, extinction, and particle linear depolarization ratio) and stored in the EARLINET database available at www.earlinet.org. A specific relational database providing the volcanic mask over Europe, realized ad hoc for this specific event, has been developed and is available on request at http://www.earlinet.org.

 

The 4-D distribution of volcanic aerosol layering and optical properties on European scale reported here provides an unprecedented data set for evaluating satellite data and aerosol dispersion models for this kind of volcanic events.