The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) was one of the national environmental data centers operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The main NODC facility was located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was made up of five divisions. The NODC also had field offices collocated with major government or academic oceanographic laboratories in Stennis Space Center, MS; Miami, FL; La Jolla, San Diego, California; Seattle, WA; Austin, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2015, NODC was merged with the National Climatic Data Center and the National Geophysical Data Center into the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). NOAA also operated two other data centers: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Asheville, North Carolina and National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), Boulder, Colorado. In 2015, the three merged to form the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, is also operated for NGDC by the University of Colorado through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). These discipline-oriented centers served as national repositories and dissemination facilities for global environmental data. The data archives amassed by the NODC and the other centers provide a record of Earth's changing environment, support numerous research and operational applications, and are still available through the NCEI. Working cooperatively, the centers provided data products and services to scientists, engineers, resource managers, policy makers, and other users—both in the United States and around the world. History Established in 1961, the NODC was originally an interagency facility administered by the U.S. Naval Hydrographic (later Oceanographic) Office. The NODC was transferred to NOAA in 1970 when NOAA was created by Executive Order by then-President, Richard Nixon. In the words of its charter, the NODC serves to "acquire, process, preserve, and disseminate oceanographic data." Its primary mission is to ensure that global oceanographic data sets collected at great cost are maintained in a permanent archive that is easily accessible to the world science community, and to other users. Mission The NODC's mission statement was "To provide scientific stewardship of marine data and information". Core description The National Oceanographic Data Center, National Coastal Data Development Center (NCDDC) and NOAA Central Library, with its regional branch assets, were integrated to provide access to the world's most comprehensive sources of marine environmental data and information. NODC maintains and updates a national ocean