NODC Ocean Color Archive

Introduction

This site contains an overview of the NOAA archive services being provided for Level 2 (L2) ocean color products generated by the CoastWatch program. CoastWatch is an operational NOAA program that processes near real-time satellite data and makes it available to a variety of users in order to manage U.S. coastal resources and understand climate variability. CoastWatch currently produces near real-time ocean color products from multiple platforms. These include Level 1A (L1A) data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) on board NASA/GeoEye's OrbView-2 satellite, and L2 data from SeaWiFS, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites, and the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MERIS) on board the European Space Agency's (ESA) Envisat platform.

Archive Strategy

In June of 2008, the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) received a formal Request to Archive from CoastWatch for its L2 ocean color products. These products were approved for archive by NODC using NOAA's Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS). Under the new NOAA Data Center-CLASS relationship, CLASS will focus on information technology in support of the archive (ingest, archival storage and access) while NODC is responsible for the overall archive services, including preservation planning, scientific stewardship, documentation and metadata management. An archive team consisting of representatives from CoastWatch, NODC and CLASS is currently working to fulfill the archive requirements for these products. One of these requirements is the completion of the NODC Submission Agreement (SA), which contains detailed descriptions of the products as well as information about data submission and dissemination, and links to other relevant documentation. While this is a living document, the most current version of the CoastWatch L2 ocean color SA is available here.

Ocean Color Product Information

The L2 ocean color products generated by CoastWatch from SeaWiFS, MODIS and MERIS data consist primarily of spatial information on chlorophyll-a concentration, as well as turbidity (reflectance), covering 13 CoastWatch regions globally. Products derived from all three sensors have approximately 1 km-per-pixel resolution, and will be delivered as both daily and 61-day composites. All files will be in CoastWatch Hierarchical Data Format (HDF). For more detailed information about these products, refer to the SIF in the section above.

While more interoperable connections are being established between CLASS and NODC information technology systems, users may search and download or request CoastWatch L2 ocean color data directly from the CLASS website:

• SeaWiFS
• MODIS
• MERIS

While MODIS data is freely and openly accessible to the public, access to SeaWiFS and MERIS data is restricted to users covered by the SeaWiFS CoastWatch contract or registered with ESA, respectively. For information on how to become an authorized user, or for other questions, please contact the NODC satellite oceanography team at NCEI.info@noaa.gov.

Note that CLASS is a high-latency tape storage system and there may be some wait involved when accessing data.