It is increasingly recognized that light-absorbing impurities deposited on a surface can reduce its albedo and lead to increased absorption of solar radiation. Natural dust can travel substantial distances in the Earth’s atmosphere from its original source. It affects all climatic zones from the tropics to the poles and it may have a regional or global impact on air quality and human health. In the Arctic, a rapid increase in temperature compared to the global change, known as Arctic Amplification, is closely linked to snow albedo feedback. Furthermore, recent studies detail an extreme climate change scenario in the history of our planet that lead to catastrophic cascading events and global mass extinction triggered by atmospheric soot injections. Therefore, knowledge of optical properties of dust particles is important for improved climate models and dust effect studies. Here we report detailed results of multi-angular polarized measurements of light scattered by volcanic sand particles obtained with the FIGIFIGO goniospectrometer (Peltoniemi et al. 2014). The design concept of this custom made instrument has a well designed user friendly interface, a high level of automation, and an excellent adaptability to a wide range of weather conditions during field measurements. The foreoptics is connected to an ASD FieldSpec Pro FR 350-2500 nm spectroradiometer by an optical fiber. A calcite Glan-Thompson prism is used as a polarizer, covering the full spectral range with better than 1% accuracy. The samples studied in this work were collected from the Mýrdalssandur area in Iceland (in March 2016) and from the Villarica area in Chile (in July 2019). Following established FGI practices in laboratory conditions samples are further divided into the following categories: (1) natural volcanic sand, (2) sieved volcanic sand (dust) where the size of the particles is less than 250 μm, including dry and wet sample condition, and (3) a fine-grained powder of milled volcanic sand measurable also as aerosol. The potential use of the results from our measurements are diverse, including their use as a ground truth reference for Earth Observation and remote sensing studies, estimating climate change over time, as well as measuring other ecological effects caused by changes in atmospheric composition or land cover.