OBPG File Naming Convention

As the Ocean Biology Processing Group and the Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center add to the number of supported data sets, it was determined that the existing file naming convention lacked consistency. In an effort to address the shortcomings of a naming convention that was originally designed to support a single mission, a new convention was defined. Beginning in October 2019, this new convention will be in use by the OBPG. It will be applied to each mission/data set as it is reprocessed by the OBPG. The first data set to get the new scheme will be the SST data sets for MODIS (Aqua and Terra, R2019) and SNPP VIIRS (R2016).

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

Examples

Note: Switching to this convention will occur at a reprocessing (or initial processing in the case of the OLCI sensors). For the Level 1 source data we control (e.g. SeaWiFS), the change in name will accompany a change in file format (HDF4->NetCDF-4)

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3