The AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) from NASA/GSFC

AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) is an optical ground based aerosol
monitoring network and data archive supported by NASA's Earth
Observing System and expanded by federation with many non-NASA
institutions. The network hardware consists of identical automatic
sun-sky scanning spectral radiometers owned by national agencies and
universities. Data from this collaboration provides globally
distributed near real time observations of aerosol spectral optical
depths, aerosol size distributions, and precipitable water in diverse
aerosol regimes. The data undergo preliminary processing (real time
data), reprocessing (final calibration about 6 mo. after data collection),
quality assurance, archiving and distribution from NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center master archive and several identical data bases
maintained globally. The data provides algorithm validation of
satellite aerosol retrievals and characterization of
aerosol properties that are unavailable from satellite sensors.

Unscreened (Level 1.0) and cloud filtered (Level 1.5) real-time
data are available online as are Level 2.0 quality assured data
from:

"http://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/"