The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is being used to continue the record of Earth Science observations and data products produced routinely from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements. However, the absolute calibration of VIIRS's reflected solar bands is thought to be biased, leading to offsets in derived data products such as aerosol optical depth (AOD) when similar algorithms are applied to the different sensors. This study presents a vicarious calibration of these VIIRS bands against MODIS Aqua over dark water scenes, finding corrections to VIIRS between approximately +2 % and −7 % (dependent on band) are needed to bring the two into alignment, and indications of relative trending of up to ~ 0.45 % per year in some bands. The derived vicarious gains are also applied in an AOD retrieval, and are shown to decrease the bias and total error in AOD across the midvisible spectral region compared to the standard VIIRS NASA calibration. The resulting bias characteristics are similar to those of NASA MODIS AOD data products, which is encouraging in terms of multisensor data continuity.