The original concept of the HR-DDS was developed at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy by Dr. Simon Pinnock and Dr. Craig Donlon. The system was envisaged as a distributed DODS archive of regularly gridded subsets of all available types of satellite data over a few specially selected small regions of the global ocean. The concept was taken up by the international GODAE High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Pilot Project (GHRSST-PP) under the leadership of Dr. Donlon. The concept was reduced in scope to only SST to consist a distributed archive of only SST and essential ancillary data, although the number of sites was dramatically increased from ~30 to ~140. The Medspiration Project secured funding from ESA to develop a demonstration HR-DDS archive for the Atlantic from all available Medspiration data products. The system formed part of the Medspiration project but was also separable and as such had some distributive capacity. The system was designed and implemented by David Poulter at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. The EU MERSEA-IP project funded a further round of enhancements to the HR-DDS system by supporting the development of an interactive database backend to the HR-DDS system. This allowed for users to get an 'idea' of the contents of thousands of HR-DDS granules instantly in real time. This is the core of the web service operating today. Seeing the benefits brought about by an operational HR-DDS system the Met Office funded a round of enhancements to the backend and frontend of the system. This allowed for numerous performance enhancements and enabled the HR-DDS to ingest many times the amount of data that was previously possible. The Met Office is currently funding a third round of improvements to the HR-DDS, including the development of and experimental wave data HR-DDS.