August 28, 2006 Dear Colleagues, In July 2006, I announced that the AERONET Version 2 inversion products were available from the new AERONET website for most of the database. Reprocessing was expected to be completed by late August. Unfortunately there were several bugs in the code that generated larger fitting errors at very high and very low optical depths. This caused our quality assurance algorithm to reject many almucantar retrievals that were successfully retrieved in Version 1. The problems are identified and we are verifying the results in an effort to eliminate any remaining bugs. The operational code is expected to be finalized by mid September however we must reprocess the entire database again which with our current computing power will require approximately five months. We're searching for means to augment our computing resources. To facilitate more timely access to the data products, we will process current data first and work backward in time initially processing only those that qualify for the quality assured, level 2, database. Once that is completed we will process all of the almucantar data followed by the principle plane data. Please contact me if you have an immediate need for a subset of these retrievals, that perhaps we can run a special processing for your requirement. My apology for this delay but the problem wasn't identified until we had quite a large body of data available for statistical analysis. Currently V1 inversion products are available from the website and V2 inversion products have been removed. I will provide a processing schedule for V2 on the AERONET website as soon as we know it. All V2 AOD products remain available. Brent Holben 001 301 614 6658 v Code 614.4 001 301 614 6695 f NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center brent@aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov Greenbelt, MD 20771 http://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov USA