Meso-NH is the non-hydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric model of the French research community. It has been jointly developed by the Laboratoire d’Aérologie (UMR 5560 UPS/CNRS) and by CNRM-GAME (UMR 3589 CNRS/Météo-France). Meso-NH:

• Incorporates a non-hydrostatic system of equations, for dealing all scales ranging from large (synoptic) to small (large eddy) scales while calculating budgets; 
• Has a complete set of physical parameterizations, particularly advanced for the representation of clouds and precipitation; 
• Is coupled to the surface model SURFEX for representing the ground atmosphere interactions by considering different surface types (vegetation, city, ocean, lake); 
• Allows for a multi-scale approach through a grid-nesting technique; 
• Is a versatile code, vectorized, parallelized, operating in 1D, 2D or 3D designed to handle real situations as well as academic cases; 
• Is coupled with a chemistry module (including gas-phase, aerosol, and aqua-phase components) and a lightning module; 
• Has observation operators that compare directly model output with satellite observations, radar, lidar and GPS.