How accurately can suborbital experiments measure the CMB?

Great efforts are currently being channeled into ground- and balloon-based CMB experiments, mainly to explore polarization and anisotropy on small angular scales. To optimize instrumental design and assess experimental prospects, it is important to understand in detail the atmosphere-related systematic errors that limit the science achievable with new instruments. As a step in this direction, we spatially compare the 648 square degree ground- and balloon-based QMASK map with the atmosphere-free WMAP map, finding beautiful agreement on all angular scales where both are sensitive. Although much work remains on quantifying atmospheric effects on CMB experiments, this is a reassuring quantitative assessment of the power of the state-of-the-art fast-Fourier-transform- and matrix-based mapmaking techniques that have been used for QMASK and virtually all subsequent experiments.