Martian Year 34 Climatology of the Atmospheric Column Dust Optical Depth

We provide a climatology of airborne dust for Martian year 34 using observations of the Martian atmosphere from May 2016 to March 2018 made by the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Our methodology works by gridding the available estimates of column dust optical depth (CDOD) from MCS limb observations. The resulting (irregularly) gridded maps were validated with independent observations of CDOD by the Mars Color Imager camera aboard MRO, and by the MastCam camera aboard the Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity". We produce one dataset with four gridded maps per sol and one dataset with diurnal averages of the gridded maps (one map per sol). Finally, regular maps of CDOD are produced by spatially interpolating the irregularly gridded, diurnally averaged maps using a kriging method. These latter maps are used as column-integrated MY 34 dust scenarios in the Mars Climate Database (MCD), and are useful in many modelling applications.