As part of the AQMEII project, vertical profiles of a number of variables simulated by several state-of-the-science regional-scale air quality (AQ) models are evaluated against measurements collected by instrumented aircraft over Europe (EU) and North America (NA) continental-scale domains for the full year of 2006. Tropospheric profiles of ozone, carbon monoxide, wind speed, temperature and relative humidity simulated by the AQ models at 12 selected airport locations in NA and 3 in EU are considered here for model evaluation. Moreover, in this study, several model outputs are inter-compared to examine the models' ability to reproduce the observed variability for ozone.