It was founded in 1999 on the initiative of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL – Research Federation of the CNRS) and the Ecole Polytechnique to federate research (fundamental or applied) and teaching activities of laboratories in the Paris region in the fields of instrumentation and atmospheric measurements. The SIRTA is a service of the IPSL.

The SIRTA is a reference tool at the European and international levels. It gathers and coordinates the instruments and competences of ten research units (mainly IPSL, LMD, LATMOS, CEREA, LSCE; but also LISA, CNRM, LPC2E, IPGP, GEEPS, LIMSI). The scientific purpose of SIRTA is to provide innovative tools to (1) understand and quantify the effects of local processes on the climate anomalies frequently encountered in the Paris region in order to identify areas of adaptation that can reduce these effects ; (2) to quantify the impacts on the regional climate of upper tropospheric ice clouds formed by air traffic; (3) to improve our understanding of the processes driving low clouds and winter fog that strongly impact traffic and summer convective clouds that can create severe thunderstorms, in order to better predict and quantify their effects; (4) precisely characterize the nature of the different sources of aerosols encountered in the Paris region and their evolution, in order to bring precise constraints to future air quality regulation decisions; (5) quantify and precisely characterize the efficiency of photovoltaic and wind power generation systems in real conditions, and develop solutions to make them more adapted to consumption needs.