The following activities have been proposed to contribute to the ESA EarthCARE Validation Programme, in response to the ESA AO for the Validation of EarthCARE. An overview of ground-based lidars (blue), radars (yellow), collocated lidars with radars (red) and other instruments (green) is depicted below. Note that this excludes dense networks of stations.

Ground-based instrumentation is complemented by numerous airborne and satellite instruments, which by their nature cannot be shown as points on the map above.