A dedicated Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services(INCOIS) was set up at Hyderabad in February 1999 as an autonomous society under DOD for generating ocean data products and disseminating them on operational basis. Near real-time data and data products such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Potential Fishing Zone(PFZ) advisories, upwelling zones, maps, eddies, chlorophyll, suspended sediment load, coastal maps, etc., and need based ocean information consultancy services to the corporate sector, State and Central Government agencies will be available under one roof. The Marine Data Centres (MDCs) which were set up under DOD's National Ocean Information System (NOIS) programme have been integrated with OIS.

During 1998-99, generation and dissemination of SST and PFZ to 170 fish landing centres, were continued. Also validation campaign of Modular Optoelectronic Scanner (MOS) algorithms for retrieval of chlorophyll data from the Indian ocean useful for validation campaign of the to-be launched Oceansat satellite, were continued.