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Observation and tracking of volcanic aerosols are important for preventing possible aviation hazards and determining the influence of aerosols on climate. The useful information primary includes the concentration, particle size and altitude of aerosol load. Moreover, volcanic eruptions are usually accompanied by strong emissions of SO2 and enhanced concentrations of H2O in the atmosphere. Volcanic ash particles can also catalyze the formation of ice clouds by serving as cloud nuclei. Hyperspectral infrared sounders, such as IASI (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer), have proven to be powerful tools for capturing volcanic aerosol and ice cloud signatures and enhanced volcanic gas concentrations. Information on atmospheric constituents is extracted from such hyperspectral measurements with the help of radiative transfer (RT) codes capable of solving both direct and inverse RT problems. We will demonstrate the retrieval of aerosol and ice cloud physical properties together with gas concentration from IASI measurements with the help of the AVL RT model. AVL is one of the 'code combination packages' which are becoming more and more popular in the scientific domain. It consists of several codes, each of which handles a specific set of physics-related tasks. The codes function smoothly as a whole due to the use of a special interface. AVL is perfectly suitable (i) to model the propagation of UV-visible-IR radiation through a coupled atmosphere-surface system for a wide range of atmospheric, spectral and geometrical conditions; and (ii) to retrieve vertical gas profiles and aerosol concentration through the use of its embedded retrieval algorithm on the basis of an optimal estimation method (OEM). The retrievals are performed for IASI measurements (radiance, Level 1C product) carried out over Eyjafjallajo¨kull volcano, Iceland, in April 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]