All science data files produced from PACE will follow the standard naming convention of NASA's Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG). The filename leader will be PACE_OCI, PACE_HARP, or PACE_SPEX for OCI, HARP2, and SPEXone, respectively.

OBPG naming convention:

MMMM_IIII_TTT.YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS.LLLL.PPPP.SSSS.pppp.RRRR.NRT.nc

• MMMM^*: variable-length uppercase character string indicating the "mission".
  • e.g. AQUA, PACE, S3A
• IIII: variable-length uppercase character string indicating the instrument
  • e.g. OCI (PACE Ocean Color Instrument)
• TTT: (value is absent if not relevant to product) variable-length uppercase character string indicating the data "type"
  • e.g. GAC (SeaWiFS Global Area Coverage); EFR (OLCI Full Resolution)
• YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS: ISO8601 time format, where YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the two-digit month, DD is the two-digit day, T indicates the time follows this character, HHMMSS are the two-digit hour, minutes, and seconds, respectively.
• LLLL: variable-length character string indicating the level.
  • e.g. L1B, L2, L3m
• PPPP: period indicator for L3
  • e.g. DAY, MO, YR, R32
• SSSS: suite identifier
  • e.g. RRS, CHL
• pppp: product identifier
  • e.g. Rrs_412, chlor_a
• RRRR^**: resolution
  • e.g. 4km
• NRT: (value is absent if not relevant to product) Near Real-Time identifier

* The mission identifier could be a reasonably shortened representation, e.g. Sentinel-3A = S3A
** The resolution element includes the units, e.g. 4km, 1deg

All PACE data available through NASA are fully and openly available without restriction.

For data distributed by NASA’s Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center (OB.DAAC), use the reference notation of: Author, Release Date, Dataset Title, Publisher, doi reference, and date accessed.

Example:

NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group. (2018). Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) Level-2 Cloud Phase (daily), NASA Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center. doi:XX.XXXX/XXXXX. Accessed on Month/day/year.