requirement for imaging individual passes, although individual 

 Level II tapes should be preserved for 6 months for selected 

 processing on request. 



d. All high- and low-resolution Level I tapes should be preserved in 

 an archive for 5 years. Users should have on-line, interactive 

 access to a catalogue of the archived data. 



e. The difficulty and cost involved in handling the flow from a high- 

 data-rate instrument such as this is recognized. Ideally, all 

 the sunlit data from the satellite should be stored and processed 

 at high resolution. A minimum requirement is the ability to 

 process 30 minutes of stored high-resolution data per day to 

 Level II chlorophyll values, and 150 minutes of stored 

 low-resolution data. This would result in enough capacity to 

 process the ocean areas near the USA to high resolution, and at 

 least one hemisphere at low resolution on a continuing basis. It 

 would be highly desirable to double the low-resolution capacity 

 to be assured of worldwide coverage. Direct broadcasting of 

 high-resolution data on at least a 50 percent duty cycle would 

 fill in the gaps of recorded high-resolution stored data for 

 those users with ground receivers. It is strongly recommended 

 that the direct broadcast mode be designed so that there is 

 minimum impact to existing ground receiver stations used by 

 researchers outside NASA. The system should be similar enough to 

 the existing NOAA infrared broadcast protocol that other users 

 need only make minor or no changes to their hardware and software 

 for data capture . 



II. 7 MISSION LENGTH 



In order to conduct the in situ field work necessary to exploit the ocean 

 color observations from space, experiments listed earlier must be staged 

 in a variety of seasons and conditions. Logistically, this implies that 

 the spacecraft mission must cover at least two years to specify a typical 

 situation, i.e., the occurrence of El Nino phenomena. In addition, even 

 the coarsest values for ranges in interannual productivity are not known 

 for most ocean areas. An absolute minimum of two years of observation is 



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