The version 8 SBUV/2 NOAA-16 ozone data were first released at the 2004 Quadrennial Ozone Symposium on DVD. The DVD contained all of the SBUV/2 data from NOAA-9, NOAA-11 and NOAA-16 satellites as well as SBUV data from the Nimbus-7 satellite. The DVD is no longer available, however all the data are available on-line from the NASA GES DISC. The NOAA-16 SBUV/2 v8 data are available from 2000-10-03 to 2003-12-31. The instrument spatial resolution is 180 km x 180 km footprint at nadir. The ozone profiles are made at 21 pressure levels between 1000 and 0.1 hPa. Each data file contains a days worth of ozone measurements, and is written in an ASCII text format.

The SBUV/2 is a scanning double monochromator and a cloud cover radiometer (CCR) designed to measure ultraviolet (UV) spectral intensities. In its primary mode of operation, the monochromator measures solar radiation backscattered by the atmosphere in 12 discrete wavelength bands in the near-UV, ranging from 252.0 to 339.8 nanometers, each with a bandpass of 1.1 nm. The total-ozone algorithm uses the four longest wavelength bands (312.5, 317.5, 331.2 and 339.8 nm), whereas the profiling algorithm uses the shorter wavelengths. The cloud cover radiometer operates at 379 nm (i.e., outside the ozone absorption band) with a 3.0 nm bandpass and was designed to measure the reflectivity of the surface in the IFOV. The SBUV/2 also makes periodic measurements of the solar flux by deploying a diffuser plate into the FOV to reflect sunlight into the measurement.