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Satellite characterization of local aerosol pollution is desirable because of the potential for broad spatial coverage, enabling transport studies of pollution from major sources, such as biomass burning events. However, retrieval of quantitative measures of air pollution such as Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) from satellite measurements is challenging over land because the underlying surface albedo may be heterogeneous in space and time. Ground-based sunphotometer measurements of AOD are unaffected by surface albedo and are crucial in enabling evaluation, testing, and further development of satellite instruments and retrieval algorithms. Columnar aerosol optical properties from ground based sunphotometers (Cimel CE-318) as part of AERONET and MODIS aerosol retrievals from Aqua and Terra satellites were compared over semi-arid California and Nevada during the summer season of 2012. Sunphotometer measurements were used as a ’ground truth’ to evaluate the current state of satellite retrievals in this spatiotemporal domain. Satellite retrieved (MODIS Collection 6) AOD showed the presence of wildfires in northern California during August. During the study period, the dark-target (DT) retrieval algorithm appears to overestimate AERONET AOD by an average factor of 3.85 in the entire study domain. AOD from the deep-blue (DB) algorithm overestimates AERONET AOD by an average factor of 1.64. Low AOD correlation was also found between AERONET, DT, and DB retrievals. Smoke from fires strengthened the aerosol signal, but MODIS versus AERONET AOD correlation hardly increased during fire events (r(2)similar to 0.1-0.2 during non-fire periods and r(2)similar to 0-0.31 during fire periods). Furthermore, aerosol from fires increased the normalized mean bias (NMB) of MODIS retrievals of AOD (NMB similar to 23%-154% for non fire periods and NMB similar to 77%-196% for fire periods). Angstrom Extinction Exponent (AEE) from DB for both Terra and Aqua did not correlate with AERONET observations. High surface reflectance and incorrect aerosol physical parametrizations may still be affecting the DT and DB MODIS AOD retrievals in the semi-arid western U.S. Published by Elsevier Ltd.