A dynamic atmosphere revealed by the Venus Express mission

International audience; ESA’s Venus Express orbiter has achieved a mission lifetime of eight years, well in excess of its original nominal science mission duration of 500 days. The science payload was selected to focus on atmospheric investigations from the deep atmosphere - probed using near-infrared spectral windows - up to the mesosphere and exosphere. While initial analyses focussed on first detections and mean atmospheric states, subsequent analyses have revealed variability on timescales ranging from diurnal to seasonal to multiannual. In the upper atmosphere, VEx/VIRTIS shows dramatic maps of O_{2} nightglow spatial distribution changing location on scales of minutes to hours, as well as gravity waves high in polar regions high above the core of the polar vortex. Thermospheric and mesospheric densities, revealed through solar and stellar occultation as well as by the VEx Atmospheric Drag Experiment, are observed to vary by over 100% on a day-to-day basis. The Southern polar vortex was revealed to change shape on a day-to-day basis, taking sometimes the previously observed wavenumber-2 shape (“polar dipole”) but changing rapidly also to wavenumber-1 or wavenumber-3 shapes. In the lower / middle cloud layer Venus Express was able to map the formation and dissipation of regions of thin and thick cloud on timescales of hours to days. But it is the long-term changes on periods of several years which are perhaps the most intriguing. Mean zonal wind speed at low latitudes at cloud-top altitude, as revealed by cloud tracking in UV imagery, is found to have increased by 30% over the period 2007-2013. Mesospheric sulphur dioxide abundances were found to increase fourfold during 2006-2008 followed by a tenfold decrease in 2008-2012, echoing a pattern seen earlier from Pioneer Venus and Hubble observations. There may also be associated long-term changes in the UV albedo of Venus - this is still under investigation. But to date no long-term trend has been observed in the abundance of other trace gas species, notably of water vapour, which might be expected to vary alongside mesospheric sulphur dioxide abundances. Explaining this combination of observations provides constraints and challenges for our understanding of the Venus atmosphere. In this presentation we review the highlights of Venus Express atmospheric science results, with particular focus on temporal variability.