Requirements:

IOOS partners must describe how they will provide initial stewardship and ensure permanent archiving of their observations, model outputs, metadata and derived information products of archival quality. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is the nominal archive center for IOOS data. IOOS data providers must archive their data at NCEI.

Standards and Protocols:

• Data providers are expected to provide for storage of data, metadata and other supporting documentation and algorithm descriptions, to establish data recovery mechanisms, and to perform off-site storage of backups until the data and metadata are submitted to NCEI for archiving.
• Data must be stored in one of the IOOS Common Data Formats adhere to IOOS Metadata Standards.
• NOAA IOOS will facilitate execution of NCEI partnerships with IOOS partners.
  RA data already in the NCEI Ocean Archive System can be accessed through NCEI's IOOS Archive Data Portal.

Implementation Methods/Practices:

NCEI has two primary options for archiving your data depending on the data delivery frequency and your data volume.

• For non-repeating or single delivery data no larger than 20 GB in size, please submit your data to NCEI for archive appraisal at Send2NCEI.
• For repeating or multiple delivery data or any data with total volume greater than 20GB, please submit your archive request to the Advanced Tracking and Resource Tool for Archive Collections (ATRAC).

The process steps of setting up data archival with NCEI is detailed in their website.