“…However, significant progress in characterizing the tropospheric aerosol vertical distribution has been made in the recent years through the use of ground‐ and satellite‐based lidar measurements, especially those from the Cloud–Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) satellite that has been acquiring cloud and aerosol backscattering data since mid‐June 2006 [ Winker et al , ]. The CALIOP Level 2 Layer 5 km product [ Liu et al , , ; Omar et al , ; Vaughan et al , , ] has been used in previous studies to assess the 3‐D distribution of tropospheric aerosols from regional to global scales [e.g., Yu et al , ; Koffi et al , ; Sheridan et al , ; Di Pierro et al , ; Winker et al , ; Prijith et al , ]. Despite several limitations (see, for instance, Koffi et al [], Winker et al [ ], Young et al [], and Kim et al []), the version 3.01 product [e.g., Hu et al , ; Liu et al , ; Vaughan et al , ] was shown to provide a realistic and representative description of the mean regional vertical distributions and seasonal variations of aerosol extinctions, over source and downwind regions.…”