In late August, the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Science Data Segment initiated the version 3.1 reprocessing of all Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) products. This reprocessing is now complete, and full-mission PACE OCI V3.1 products can now be acquired from NASA’s Earthdata Search. Read the release notes describing the changes.
In addition, we completed full-mission processing and distribution for a number of new product suites, which are also now available on Earthdata Search. These include:
- OCI aerosol products over land, ocean, and clouds from the Unified Aerosol Algorithm (UAA) algorithm
- Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration one (SPEXone) aerosol products over land and ocean from the RemoTAP algorithm
- SPEXone aerosol and ocean color products from the Multi-Angular Polarimetric Ocean Color (MAPOL) algorithm
- Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter #2 (HARP2) cloud products from the GISS Polarimetric Cloud (GPC) algorithm
- HARP2 aerosol and ocean color products from the MAPOL algorithm
Further details on these new products are provided in the release notes above.
Note that the calibrations (Level-1B/C products) for all three instruments are currently at version 3, so all higher-level product collections derived from these version-3 calibrations are tagged as version 3.x to indicate that provenance.
Also note there are now a total of 82 version 3.1 OCI collections available on Earthdata Search, spanning Level 2 through Level 4 and including both near real-time (NRT) and refined cloud, land, ocean, and atmospheric product suites. The NRT version 3.1 collections generally span from July 2, 2025, through today and utilize the best available instrument calibration and ancillary data at the time of downlink. The refined collections (those excluding the NRT moniker) span the full mission from March 5, 2024, through August 2025, with new data generally lagging by one month to wait for refined instrument calibration and ancillary inputs. Similarly, there are now 18 version 3 HARP2 collections and 17 version 3 SPEXone collections available, including both NRT and refined collections.
Beyond these updates, we have an array of new products and algorithms at various stages of integration and test, including several phytoplankton community composition products, coastal water quality products, BRDF-corrected land surface reflectances, and atmospheric gases. The next one likely to be released is an atmospheric trace gas product that provides NO2 and O3 retrievals at native OCI spatial and temporal resolution. We expect the trace gas product to be available as a full-mission test product within the next month.