In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would dismantle a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent more than $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI), but suspicions immediately focused on the network’s role in tracking climate change.
But OOI also provides data that is useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it is reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much OOI lost in the intervening months.
As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Arce received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.
OOI is a federally supported resource that provides ocean data for use by academic researchers, government planners, and private companies. It involves a series of monitoring systems at multiple locations in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that can track things like currents, salinity, chemical levels, temperature, and tectonic activity. (There are more than 100 individual entries on the page that display data collected by the system.)
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