One Year of PACE OCI Chlorophyll

  • Released Wednesday, June 11, 2025
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The Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) on the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) spacecraft is an optical spectrometer designed to detect phytoplankton by accurately measuring the the spectrum of sunlight reflected from the ocean. PACE was launched on February 8, 2024, and the first OCI global map of ocean chlorophyll was produced on March 4, 2024.

This year-long visualization of PACE chlorophyll data uses a traditional rainbow color palette to show areas with high chlorophyll concentration in red and yellow, medium chlorophyll in green and low chloroiphyll in blue and purple. Each individual image is a 30 day average, and the visualization covers one year, from March 2024 to March 2025, revealing the seasonal cycle of phytoplankton activity.

A year-long animation of global maps of Pace OCI Chlorophyll

A year-long animation of PACE OCI Chlorophyll displayed on a rotating globe.

Credits

Data credit: NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group. (2024). PACE OCI Level-3 Global Mapped Chlorophyll (CHL) Data, version 3.0 [Dataset]. NASA Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/PACE/OCI/L3M/CHL/3.0

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, July 2, 2025 at 9:03 AM EDT.