Capt. Ed Enos makes his living as a harbor pilot in Hawaii, clambering aboard arriving ships in the predawn hours and guiding them into port.

His world revolves around wind speeds, current strength and wave swells. When Enos is bobbing in dangerous waters in the dark, his cellphone is his lifeline: with a few taps he can access the Integrated Ocean Observing System and pull up the data needed to guide what are essentially floating warehouses safely to the dock.

But maybe not for much longer. President Donald Trump wants to eliminate all federal funding for the observing system’s regional operations. Scientists say the cuts could mean the end of efforts to gather real-time data crucial to navigating treacherous harbors, plotting tsunami escape routes and predicting hurricane intensity.

The IOOS system launched about 20 years ago. It’s made up of 11 regional associations in multiple states and territories, including the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington state, Michigan, South Carolina and Southern California.

The regional groups are networks of university researchers, conservation groups, businesses and anyone else gathering or using maritime data. The associations are the Swiss army knife of oceanography, using buoys, submersible drones and radar installations to track water temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, wave speeds, swell heights and current strength.

The networks monitor the Great Lakes, U.S. coastlines, the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Alaska, the Caribbean and the South Pacific and upload member data to public websites in real time.

Cruise ship, freighter and tanker pilots like Enos, as well as the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, use the information directly to navigate harbors safely, plot courses around storms and conduct search-and-rescue operations.

The associations’ observations feed into National Weather Service forecasts. The Pacific Northwest association uses tsunami data to post real-time coastal escape routes on a public-facing app. And the Hawaii association not only posts data that is helpful to harbor pilots but tracks hurricane intensity and tiger sharks that have been tagged for research.