Aeronet's Version 2.0 quality assurance criteria

Abstract

The AERONET inversion products provide powerful information for understanding column integrated aerosol properties particularly given the wide global distribution of sites and the 13 year record for some sites. Significant evolution of the instrument, data quality, ancillary input data and inversion algorithm has necessitated release of Version 2.0 and establishment of criteria for quality assured products. This paper documents version 1.0 quality assurance criteria and the analysis of the entire retrieval record available for the Version 2.0 to revise the quality assured criteria. The result is an improvement in the number and quality of aerosol inversion parameters for most sites through the entire AERONET data record.