Seventy-three pairs of nearly coincident profiles of aerosol extinction at visible wavelengths from the Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer (Version 3.1) and the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) II (Version 5.931) are compared for a week in January and February 1997. The comparisons require an interpolation of SAGE II multi-wavelength aerosol extinction profiles to compensate for the difference between the measurement wavelengths of the two instruments. The profiles are shown to agree within ten percent for the altitude range from approximately 15 to 24 km, with a small systematic bias that requires further study. ¿ 1999 American Geophysical Union