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Description

The Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) is the successor to ENVISAT's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) having additional spectral channels, different camera arrangements and simplified on-board processing. The OLCI is a push-broom instrument with five camera modules sharing the field of view. The field of view of the five cameras is arranged in a fan-shaped configuration in the vertical plane, perpendicular to the platform velocity. Each camera has an individual field of view of 14.2° and a 0.6° overlap with its neighbors. The whole field of view is shifted across track by 12.6° away from the sun to minimize the impact of sun glint. OLCI is equipped with on-board calibration hardware based on sun diffusers. There are three sun diffusers--two 'white' diffusers dedicated to radiometric calibration and one dedicated to spectral calibration, with spectral reflectance features. The native resolution is approximately 300m, refered to as Full Resolution (FR). A Reduced Resolution (RR) processing mode provides Level-1B data at sampling rates decreased by a factor of four in both spatial dimensions resulting to resolution of approximately 1.2 km.

Version Description

Reprocessing of Ocean Color (OC) Datasets

Product Summary

Platforms
Sentinel-3A
Instruments
OLCI
Spatial Extent

N: 90 S: -90 E: 180 W: -180

Geographic Region
GLOBAL OCEAN
Coordinate System
CARTESIAN
Granule Spatial Representation
CARTESIAN
Temporal Extent
2016-04-05 to Present
Data Partner
Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) ,
Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center (OB.DAAC), Global Change Data Center, Earth Sciences Division, Science and Exploration Directorate, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA (NASA/GSFC/SED/ESD/GCDC/OB.DAAC)
Concept ID
C3406447152-OB_CLOUD
Data State
ACTIVE
Number of Files/Granules
4607
Processing Level
3
Published
Updated
Science Keywords
Attenuation/Transmission ,
Top of Atmosphere (TOA) Refelctance

Citation

Citation is critically important for dataset documentation and discovery. This dataset is openly shared, without restriction, in accordance with the EOSDIS Data Use and Citation Guidance.

Copy Citation

NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group. (2025). Sentinel-3A OLCI Level-3 Global Binned Earth-observation Reduced Resolution (ERR) Diffuse Attenuation Coefficient for Downwelling Irradiance (KD) Data, version 2022.0 [Data set]. NASA Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/S3A/OLCI/L3B/ERR/KD/2022.0 Date Accessed: 2025-12-14

Documents

Variables

Variables are a set of physical properties whose values determine the characteristics or behavior of something. For example, temperature and pressure are variables of the atmosphere. Parameters and variables can be used interchangeably. Variable level attributes provide individual information for each variable.

The Name in this table is the variable name. Fill value indicates missing or undefined data points in a variable. Valid range is the range of values the variable can store. Scale factor is used to increase or decrease the size of an object and can be used to correct for distortion. For questions on a specific variable, please use the Earthdata Forum.

Name Description Units Data Type Fill Value Valid Range Scale Factor
level-3_binned_data/BinIndex level-3_binned_data/BinIndex N/A OTHER N/A N/A N/A
level-3_binned_data/BinList level-3_binned_data/BinList N/A OTHER N/A N/A N/A
level-3_binned_data/Kd_490 level-3_binned_data/Kd_490 N/A OTHER N/A N/A N/A
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