Aerosols, produced by both natural and anthropogenic processes, are integral in Earth’s climate system. They perturb the radiative budget and hydrologic cycle, through complicated interactions with clouds and the Earth’s surface. Understanding global aerosol distributions, variability and trends are a necessary step in understanding how the climate is changing. Deriving a quantifiable, comprehensive, and long-term global aerosol data record is a primary goal for NASA.

With its launch aboard Terra in late 1999, MODIS ushered in a new era of global aerosol monitoring. In particular, due to its extensive spectral range, wide viewing swath, and fine spatial resolution (1 km or better), MODIS is capable of providing an accurate and dependable global aerosol optical depth (AOD) data set. MODIS’s AOD products are freely and easily available from NASA, and are currently being accessed by hundreds of users around the world. Production of such a high quality aerosol dataset has required an extensive production team, of which I am proud to have been a part of for the past ten years. As the principal developer of the “second generation” algorithm for retrieving aerosol over dark land surfaces, I guided it from conception, to implementation and finally to validation of its derived products. However, it still must be improved in order to provide climate data quality records. My talk will highlight my contributions to the MODIS related aerosol effort as well as suggest steps towards attainment of climate-quality aerosol data.