The operational data products for the Michelson interferometer Mipas on the ESA satellite Envisat include among others vertical pro les of temperature, two geometric altitude scales, and pressure. Checks show that pressure acts as a better vertical scale than either of the geometric altitude scales. The geometric altitude scales suffer from occasional latitude-dependent differences. About 15%of the 60 000 available pro les have no temperature values. In addition there are unphysical values for pressure, temperature, and errors in the data products. Comparing the remaining Mipas temperature pro les with temperatures from radiosondes and Rayleigh lidars shows the Mipas T accuracy to be 0.35 and 0.3 K, respectively, which is better than predicted before launch. Below 18 km altitude there is an increasing positive bias of Mipas temperatures w.r.t. radiosonde temperatures with decreasing altitude. The precisions of 3 K and 5 K, respectively, are factors of 3 and 5 times times larger than predicted. Contributions to the precision come from the Mipas measurement, its conversion to temperature, the altitude assigned to the Mipas measurement, the precision of the comparing instrument, the differing observation geometries, and the geophysical variability of the atmosphere.