The Icelandic eruption has given researchers the opportunity of a lifetime, Katherine Sanderson reports in Nature News. On the evening of 14 April, Gelsomina Pappalardo sent a rushed message to her colleagues across Europe, asking them to switch on their lasers and point them skywards. Pappalardo coordinates the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network (EARLINET).
“This is not a simple technique,” she says. Pappalardo wants to ensure that the information she gives to others is accurate, so that forecasts made with those data are correct. So she stays up late, collating and analyzing data from the 26 lidar stations across Europe, and then making the results available to aviation authorities.
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