The atmosphere seen from space / L'atmosphère vue de l'espace - Les numéros thématiques des Comptes rendus - Série Geoscience

Observing the Earth from space has considerably dified our view of the planet and galvanized the th’s sciences. Recent reviews on the Earth’s observas have focused on the ocean (Cazenave and Boucher, 6), the solid Earth or the biosphere. However, space sions are still largely driven by the need to knowmore the structure, composition and dynamics of the osphere. To review the entire field of atmospheric observations space is indeed an ambitious project, because of the e number and diversity of an area of vividly growing nce and applications. We proposed a synopsis and we ked for potential contributions in order to provide some rview of atmospheric observation from space, from the sopause to the ground, in combination with other erving means or methodologies, to provide the most resting scientific results. We asked the authors to ntify recent progress in their field and to highlight the llenges still to be addressed by the scientific commu, from fundamental concepts to applied research. Aswe re collecting contributions, we realized that this review ld not be an exhaustive coverage of the subject: we e that it can provide a good start to exploring the osphere from space and to pointing out some ortant challenges. Let us give here the flavour of what you will discover he following pages. We start from the Sun, the main rgy source for the Earth. Dudok de Wit and Waternn (2010) address the controversial challenge of the act of solar variability on long-term changes, besides direct radiative forcing. These mechanisms, though aker than radiative forcing, can have a significant erage, despite poorly known underlying physics, and y impact on the terrestrial atmosphere, on time scales ging from days to millennia. The issue of the climate lution through time is then discussed by Paillard 10) who addresses the two competing theories Avant-propos