The Visible/Infrared Imaging/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) spacecraft provides validated daily global aerosol optical thickness (AOT) retrievals; however, a close examination of the VIIRS aerosol product identified residual snow and snowmelt contamination, resulting generally in an overestimation of AOT. The contamination was particularly evident over northern hemisphere high latitude regions during the spring thaw. To improve the product performance, we introduced a new empirical snow and snowmelt screening scheme that combines a Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) and Brightness Temperature (BT) based snow test, a snow adjacency test and a spatial homogeneity test (aka. spatial filter). Testing of retrievals for May 18, 2014 indicated that compared to the previous, visible reflectance anomaly (VRA) based snow test, the new NDSI and BT based snow test screened out an additional 3.44 % of VIIRS AOT retrievals, most of which were over high latitudes experiencing snowmelt. The new snow adjacency test and the homogeneity test degraded another 5.57 % and 0.26 %, respectively, otherwise Good quality AOT retrievals. For the VIIRS vs. AERONET matchups over northern hemisphere high latitude regions during three years of spring (2013–2015), the new scheme also effectively screened out a significant number of the matchups that had anomalous high positive biases attributable to snow and snowmelt contamination. The new snow and snowmelt screening scheme was transferred to the Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) VIIRS aerosol algorithm on Jun 22, 2015. Subsequently no significant snow and snowmelt contamination was found during spring 2016. The scheme is also implemented in the new Enterprise VIIRS aerosol algorithm in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Enterprise Processing System (EPS) that became operational in 2017.