Both of these variables are merged land and ocean AOD at 0.55 µm from the dark target algorithms. The “Optical_Depth_Land_And_Ocean” SDS only contains high quality pixels (QA=3 over land, QA > 0 over ocean). The “Image_Optical_Depth_Land_And_Ocean” SDS contains all valid (non-fill) pixels; this product can be used to trace aerosol plumes and make aerosol maps, but should not be used for quantitative study.