NOAA websites about extreme weather research and other topics that were expected to go dark this weekend will remain online, the agency said Friday afternoon.
The announcement came hours after news reports about two internal NOAA documents that warned about a shutdown at midnight Saturday because Trump administration officials had canceled the agency’s cloud usage contract. The websites are connected to NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
“There will be no interruption in service. All NOAA Research sites will remain online,” an agency spokesperson said in an email to POLITICO’s E&E News.
The websites that were slated to go offline focused on climate change, extreme weather research and drought monitoring, as well as other programs like NOAA’s Sea Grant, which fosters research collaborations with 34 universities around the country.
One of the internal memos indicated that “100% unrecoverable data loss will occur” if the sites went down.
Scott Waldman contributed to this report.
