After the Senate vote, Trump is overseeing measures to kill ocean surveillance

In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would separate network of ocean monitoring systems that it cost more than $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to close Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but skepticism immediately focused on the network’s role in tracking climate change.

But the OOI also provides data that is useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to criticism. Today it seems that the opposition has won because the government has announced that it will change the decision. The big question that remains is how much OOI did in the middle month.

As of now, there is no official statement from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that a decision has been made.

OOI is a government-sponsored resource that provides ocean information for use by academics, government planners, and private companies. It has monitoring systems at several locations in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like tides, minerals, chemical concentrations, temperature, and tectonic activity. (There are over 100 articles on the site that show it data collected by the system.)