Einstein-Weyl geometry, dispersionless Hirota equation and Veronese webs

We exploit the correspondence between the three-dimensional Lorentzian Einstein-Weyl geometries of the hyper-CR type and the Veronese webs to show that the former structures are locally given in terms of solutions to the dispersionless Hirota equation. We also demonstrate how to construct hyper-CR Einstein-Weyl structures by Kodaira deformations of the flat twistor space TCP1, and how to recover the pencil of Poisson structures in five dimensions illustrating the method by an example of the Veronese web on the Heisenberg group.