NODC Standard Product: Documentation for NODC Standard File Formats and Related Codes, 1960 - 1996 (NCEI Accession 0189890)

This archival information package contains data file format descriptions and related codes needed to fully interpret NODC standard data formats developed and maintained by the NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) from the 1960s until use of these standard formats, codes, and identifiers were largely deprecated in the mid-1990s.

Most NODC standard formats were identified with a 'C' or 'F', followed by a 3-digit number, e.g., C022 was the identifier for Low Resolution CTD/STD format and F022 was the identifier for High Resolution CTD/STD format. Data from other formats sent to NODC were usually converted from the original format to one of the standard formats. When no standard format was appropriate, the original data was identified with using 'L', followed by a 3-digit number, e.g., L130 was the identifier for HYDROCARBONS data in a format for which NODC had no standard equivalent.

Some NODC standard formats were only identified by a name (e.g., Station Data 2, Surface Current Underway Data "SCUDS"). The Universal BathyThermograph (UBT) format was used by multiple standard data file formats (e.g., C128 Mechanical BT, C118 Expendable BT, and other types of BathyThermographs).

NODC briefly maintained a product database known as the 'Ocean Profile Data Base' of 'OPDB'. The OPDB use a non-standard data format known a 'P3'. The P3 data format and the OPDB were discontinued in the early 2000s, but the available format information for this data format is included in 0-data/P3 subdirectory for documentary purposes.