Understanding the Earth system, its weather, climate, atmosphere, and natural/human-induced hazards is crucial to protecting the global environment, reducing disaster losses, and achieving sustainable development. Observations of the Earth system and its atmosphere from ground and space constitute the most critical input for advancing this understanding. The ground-sector lidar developments foreseen in BEYOND enforced ground-based monitoring activities in the Mediterranean, a geographical area of great importance in terms of aerosol and cloud properties.
The scientific results foreseen are expected to fill observational gaps and add on validation efforts of atmospheric satellite products. Atmospheric models that integrated on BEYOND provide forecasting services related to natural environmental disasters such as smoke dispersion associated with forest fires, volcanic ash advection and desert dust outbreaks.