Three Decades of Atmospheric Aerosol Measurements from AERONET 

The AERONET program is a federation of ground-based sun-photometer networks and operates in partnership with various national and international agencies, universities, institutions, research groups, and individual scientists and stakeholders. It provides worldwide observations of spectral aerosol optical depth, inversion products (microphysical and radiative properties), and precipitable water across diverse aerosol regimes. In addition, other network components enable measurements of normalized water-leaving radiance, solar flux, and marine aerosols. For the past three decades, AERONET has been providing long-term, continuous, and readily accessible public-domain datasets. The network has been growing steadily, with currently about 600 active sites. The program also supports research and application field campaigns around the world. The program continues to refine instrumentation, measurement techniques, and algorithms through research and development. The program's biggest strength is its imposition of standardized instruments, calibration, quality control, processing, and data distribution. This presentation will provide an overview of the program with examples of available datasets, current research, and applications. In this study, we will present a statistical analysis of AERONET data availability over the last three decades. The focus will be to understand measurement challenges, and identify geographical and scientific gaps. We will also highlight important upcoming satellite missions, field campaigns, and new research results from the AERONET team at NASA Goddard.