Unlike recent European successes in networking lidar systems (TOR, EARLINET), little coordination of North America lidar capabilities has evolved. This is believed to be largely due to the multi-agency funding and varied research goals for U.S. and Canadian lidar facilities, which includes climate change research, ozone attainment goals, PM2.5/PM10 attainment goals, investigations of the physics of optical scattering, etc. The funding agencies are diverse for these applications and campaign style use of the systems has been the norm over the last twenty years. There has been no significant funding for long term continuous measurements from surface based lidars other than those for the stratosphere (NDSC).al., 2002) and the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting (Hoff and McCann, 2002), describes a proposal by a number of lidar researchers to form a loose confederation of lidar facilities under the aegis of a program called the Regional East Atmospheric Lidar Mesonet (REALM). Funding for parts of the program has been made available from two NOAA sponsored centers, the Center for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) based at Howard University, and the Center for Remote Sensing Science and Technology (CREST) based at City College of New York. CCNY, Hampton University, and UMBC are partners in CREST.

         The future of the REALM is based on contributions from the user community who see its potential in campaign or long-term research studies on aerosols, climate, water vapor, and ozone. Proposals from REALM partners will be submitted to agencies such as NASA and EPA as research opportunities arise. There is no core funding for the effort and it is truly a collaboratory of lidar researchers interested in making something larger occur than they could individually bring to a project. Other lidar researchers are invited to become members of REALM.(Hoff et al. 2003)

For more details refer to Dr. Raymond Hoff's REALM paper