Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Archive Data Portal: Help

The Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Archive Data Portal is a search tool that enables users to discover, select, and retrieve collections of data, in their original form, from the archive holdings of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). NCEI maintains the Ocean Archive System, the official archives for data sets managed by IOOS.

Data sets can be selected based on a number of user-selectable search criteria: IOOS Regional Association, Data Category, Observation Dates, Geographic Coverage, and Additional Terms.

If you have any comments or questions, please direct them to NCEI.Info@noaa.gov.

IOOS Regional Association

Each IOOS Regional Association provides data to NCEI, and you can select whether you wish to search for data sets from each Regional Association by checking the appropriate box.

Additional Terms

This is a free text search field. The text you enter here will be searched against the content of every metadata record for every data set in the IOOS collection exactly as you enter it in the box.

Observation Dates

Start Date and End Date are defined as the starting and ending year, month, and day of the observations. Leave the fields blank to search across all available IOOS collections.

Geographic Coverage

Geographic Coverage refers to the spatial coverage (latitude and longitude bounding box) of the overall observations. Data sets will only be found if their geographic coverage overlaps the box you select. Select "Global" if you wish to find data sets from anywhere on the planet.

Search example

Imagine you are looking for buoy data from the Pacific Ocean. Here is how you can do the search:

1. In the IOOS Regional Associations section: check the "Select All" box.
2. In the Data Category section: select the term "Buoy / Station".
3. In the Geographic Coverage section: hold the "shift" key, and draw a rectangle around the Pacific Ocean. You can also enter the coordinates for latitude and longitude in the numeric fields below the map if needed.
4. Press "Search".

A list of IOOS data sets matching your search criteria will be displayed. Follow the links in the results to view more information about the data, to use machine-to-machine APIs to access the data or to download the data for local use.

Press the "Refine Search" button to update your search criteria to more precisely locate the data of interest. Press the "New Search" button to start over.