VIIRS/JPSS2 Land Aerosol Optical Depth Daily L2G Global 750m RSIN Grid V002

Known Issues

* MAIAC Lookup Tables (LUTs) are built assuming pseudo-spherical correction in single scattering which has a reduced accuracy for high sun/view zenith angles. A reduced MAIAC performance is expected at solar zenith angles > 78°.

• MAIAC may be missing bright salt pans in several world deserts. In such cases, it may generate a persistent high Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) resulting in missing surface retrievals.
• Because of inherent uncertainties of gridding on the coastline, the area of 1-3 pixels from the coastline may contain frequent artifacts in cloud mask (usually over-detection), AOD (higher values) and surface BRF. Users should exercise caution near the coastline as represented by the AOD QA bit 1010 (See Table 5.4 of the User Guide bits 8-11, 1010 -- AOD within +-2 km from the coastline is replaced by nearby AOD).
• Atmospheric Correction (AC) over detected snow: as MAIAC does not retrieve AOD over snow, it assumes a low climatology AOD=0.05 globally and 0.02 at high elevations (H>4.2 km). Over north-central China, which is often heavily polluted and low AOD assumption can lead to a significant bias, we use AOD averaged over mesoscale area of 150 km using reliable AOD retrievals over snow-free pixels. Such approach does improve quality of AC as compared to low-AOD assumption as judged by the reduced boundaries and color artifacts, but it does not account for the aerosol variability inside 150 km area.
• Ice mask is currently unreliable.
• Effective as of April 14, 2026, the processing of selected overlapping VIIRS MAIAC tiles within the forward stream has been discontinued to eliminate redundant data. A complete list of the excluded tiles can be found at VIIRS MAIAC Reduced Tiles.