SIRTA stands for Site Instrumental de Recherche par Télédétection Atmosphérique. It is a French national atmospheric observatory dedicated to cloud and aerosol research. SIRTA is located in Palaiseau (49N, 2E), 20 km south of Paris (France) in a semi-urban environment.  The observatory gathers and operates a suite of state-of-the-art active and passive remote sensing instruments from a large community to document and monitor an ensemble of radiative and dynamic processes in the atmosphere. The detailed description of the state of the atmospheric column is archived and made accessible to the scientific community. The primary applications are to improve our understanding of atmospheric processes, to test the performance of atmospheric models, and to develop new remote sensing methods for future space-borne observations.

  SIRTA is an observatory of Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL), a French research institute in environmental sciences. It is hosted by Ecole Polytechnique and supported by Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers (INSU/CNRS), Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Environnement Atmosphérique (CEREA).