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The Himawari-8 aerosol algorithm was updated to version 3 (V30). However, no study has evaluated its performance. The purpose of this study is to verify and to compare version 2.1 (V21) and V30 aerosol products, to explain which factor dominates the aerosol optical depth (AOD) error, and to provide recommendations for aerosol product usage. The AOD accuracy of V30 was better than that of V21, with a higher correlation coefficient (R) and a higher expected error (EE&#95;DT). The V30 AOD metrics (including R, EE&#95;DT, and the root mean square error) exceeded those of V21 on more than 69% of the AERONET sites and its bias from MODIS AOD was smaller than that of V21 AOD. However, the V30 AOD does not meet the metric of EE&#95;DT > 0.66. The analysis results suggest that aerosol type parameters (primarily the Ångström exponent (AE)) may be the dominant factor determining the AOD error. This reveals the direction of H8 algorithm improvement. More than 59% of the H8 AE value meets the expected error but they do not capture the variety (R < 0.3). The FMF and SSA retrieved by H8 performed poorly. The V30 AOD performs best in Japan and South Korea (83.3% of AERONET sites meet the EE&#95;DT > 0.66 requirement) and has better data accuracy in the morning. Therefore, we recommend V30 AOD morning data to users in Japan and South Korea regions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)