| Summary: | The retrieval of aerosol properties from satellite observations provides their spatial distribution over a wide area in cloud-free conditions. As such, they complement ground-based measurements by providing information over sparsely instrumented areas, albeit that significant differences may exist in both the type of information obtained and the temporal information from satellite and ground-based observations. In this paper, information from different types of satellite-based instruments is used to provide a 3-D climatology of aerosol properties over mainland China, i.e., vertical profiles of extinction coefficients from the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP), a lidar flying aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite and the column-integrated extinction (aerosol optical depth – AOD) available from three radiometers: the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Along-Track Scanning Radiometer version 2 (ATSR-2), Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) (together referred to as ATSR) and NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite, together spanning the period 1995–2015. AOD data are retrieved from ATSR using the ATSR dual view (ADV) v2.31 algorithm, while for MODIS Collection 6 (C6) the AOD data set is used that was obtained from merging the AODs obtained from the dark target (DT) and deep blue (DB) algorithms, further referred to as the DTDB merged AOD product. These data sets are validated and differences are compared using Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) version 2 L2.0 AOD data as reference. The results show that, over China, ATSR slightly underestimates the AOD and MODIS slightly overestimates the AOD. Consequently, ATSR AOD is overall lower than that from MODIS, and the difference increases with increasing AOD. The comparison also shows that neither of the ATSR and MODIS AOD data sets is better than the other one everywhere. However, ATSR ADV has limitations over bright surfaces which the ...
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