A Long-Term Record of Aerosol Optical Depth from TOMS Observations and Comparison to AERONET Measurements

Observations of backscattered near-ultraviolet radiation from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on board the Nimbus-7 (1979-92) and the Earth Probe (mid-1996 to present) satellites have been used to derive a long-term record of aerosol optical depth over oceans and continents. The results presented here constitute the first long-term nearly global climatology of aerosol optical depth over both land and water surfaces, extending the observations of aerosol optical depth to regions and times (1979 to present) not accessible to ground-based observations.