The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which hosts the World Data Service for Oceanography is a national environmental data center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NCEI are responsible for hosting and providing access to one of the most significant digital archives on earth, with comprehensive oceanic, atmospheric, and geophysical data. The primary mission of the World Data Service for Oceanography is to ensure that global oceanographic datasets collected at great cost are maintained in a permanent archive that is easily and openly accessible to the world science community and to other users.