Cities are key to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. To be able to improve a city’s resilience to the wide range of risk factors (e.g. air pollution, heat, draughts, flooding), the dynamic interactions between the city surface, human activities and the urban atmosphere must be taken into account. An improved understanding of the complex feedback mechanisms linking atmospheric boundary layer dynamics, air quality and local climates in cities is hence urgently required.

Located in suburban Paris, the SIRTA observatory has been monitoring dynamics, radiation and composition of the Paris region atmosphere since 2002, with data and advanced products widely used for process studies and the evaluation of numerical simulations.

To quantify the impact of the Paris metropolitan area on pollution transport, cloud dynamics and heat risk, SIRTA is working in close collaboration with Meteo France, Airparif and many IPSL laboratories (incl. LATMOS,  LISA, LMD, CEREA, LSCE) on advancing the Paris Region atmospheric observation capacity, which includes surface station measurements, local-scale flux observations and remote sensing of atmospheric profiles.