Aerosols affect numerous aspects of our life: visibility (and aviation concerns), air quality (and its health related issues), reduction of incoming solar radiation (for weather forecasts and long-term climate outlooks), and the dispersion of forest fire smoke. Numerous new satellite instruments provide ample support for the retrieval of aerosol information over land, yet most lack one critical aspect: Time. The GOES satellites provide the best means for monitoring aerosol over land at a temporal resolution better than twice per day (such as that from MODIS on Aqua and Terra). Monitoring of aerosols at this time resolution can provide information for air quality analysis, validation of aerosol transport models, and visibility analysis. The GOES Aerosol Smoke Product was developed to detect and monitor aerosol over land (yet it works over ocean as well). The current product runs in near realtime providing aerosol analysis over North America and the full disk of GOES-8 - with graphics available on the web. Validation with ground truth suggests that optical depth retrievals are likely within +/- 0.1, depending on location and time of day with better results in oceanic regions. Similar results were found in a comparison with Terra/MODIS aerosol data. Results are available at: http://orbit-net.nesdis.noaa.gov/crad/sat/atm/aerosol/goes/RealTime.html