Meso-NH is the non-hydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric model of the French research community jointly developed by the Laboratoire d'Aérologie (UMR 5560 UPS/CNRS) and by CNRM (UMR 3589 CNRS/Météo-France). Meso-NH incorporates a non-hydrostatic system of equations for dealing with scales ranging from large (synoptic) to small (large eddy) scales while calculating budgets and has a complete set of physical parameterizations for the representation of clouds and precipitation. It is coupled to the surface model SURFEX for representation of surface atmosphere interactions by considering different surface types (vegetation, city​​, ocean, lake) and allows a multi-scale approach through a grid-nesting technique. Meso-NH is versatile, vectorized, parallelized, and operates in 1D, 2D or 3D; it is coupled with a chemistry module (including gas-phase, aerosol, and aqua-phase components) and a lightning module, and has observation operators that compare model output directly with satellite observations, radar, lidar and GPS.