As an important greenhouse gas and air pollutant, tropospheric ozone (O3) has become a significant environmental and climate concern. Both strong local photochemical production within the troposphere and transport from the stratosphere can lead to elevated tropospheric O3 concentrations. These have increased globally over the last century due to enhanced anthropogenic precursor emissions. Monitoring of tropospheric O3 is therefore essential to understand its impact on air quality, chemical composition and climate change. Although quantifying tropospheric O3 from space is difficult because of the abundance of ozone in the stratosphere, over the past decade satellite instruments have provided valuable information on its distribution and temporal evolution. Here, we use the IASI instrument to retrieve tropospheric O3 from space and assess its ability to detect ozone in the lower troposphere during exceptional events, such as photochemical smogs. We use the WRF-Chem chemical transport model to interpret observations of tropospheric O3 from IASI, and to assess the meteorological and dynamical processes involved in such extreme events.