Six British universities are working together to establish a centre offering better forecasts of poor air quality.
The centre, the Distributed Institute for Atmospheric Composition, will help people with breathing problems to avoid inhaling dangerous levels of pollution.
It will draw together several disparate strands of work already in progress, to provide a comprehensive science base.
An investment of £2.3m in Diac comes from the Natural Environment Research Council's atmospheric centres.
Warming threat
Diac, launched on 27 January, is part of Nerc's Centres for Atmospheric Science. It includes research teams from the universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, East Anglia, Leeds, Manchester and York.
It is led from Leeds, the base of its director, Professor Mike Pilling. He said: "Increases in temperature associated with climate change could have serious implications for our future air quality.
"During a heatwave, chemicals build up in the air. As temperatures soar there is an explosion of activity as the chemicals react with one another, forming pollutants in the air above our cities.
"We need to measure and understand the complexities of this chemical soup to help predict when and why it happens, and what the implications are for human health.
"Diac is a great opportunity for the UK atmospheric science community to build on its excellence in observations and modelling, and to focus on the complex linkages that exist between the air we breathe and the impact it has on our Earth system."
Reverse effect
Professor Pilling told BBC News Online: "This work is interdisciplinary, and what we're trying to do at Diac is to draw the different actors together so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
"We'll be doing the science that underpins the better forecasts of air quality which the Met Office will be able to produce."
Experts at the launch will be discussing the deteriorating air quality over London during last summer's heatwave when levels of ozone and fine particles in the air rose, exceeding European Union limits designed to protect human health.
They will also be considering how air quality itself affects climate change, for example how ice clouds form from dust and aerosols and then absorb or reflect solar radiation to heat or cool the atmosphere (one of the biggest unknowns in climate change predictions).
Another hot topic is how soot from vehicle emissions absorbs the Sun's energy and causes warming, and how new industrial gases may act as greenhouse gases.
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