Response to 'Toward Unified Satellite Climatology of Aerosol Properties. 3. MODIS Versus MISR Versus AERONET'

A recent paper by Mishchenko et al. compares near-coincident MISR, MODIS, and AERONET aerosol optical depth (AOD) products, and reports much poorer agreement than that obtained by the instrument teams and others. We trace the reasons for the discrepancies primarily to differences in (1) the treatment of outliers, (2) the application of absolute vs. relative criteria for testing agreement, and (3) the ways in which seasonally varying spatial distributions of coincident retrievals are taken into account.