Editorial—The 2nd International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO-2010)

The formation of the International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO) in 2009 has been motivated by the rapid growth in ocean modeling research around the world. In particular, the spread of ocean modeling research in Asia during recent years and the establishment of many international collaborative modeling projects led to the first meeting, IWMO-2009, which was held in Taipei, Taiwan, 23–26 February 2009 (see the two special issues resulted from this meeting: Oey et al. 2010a, b). The second meeting (IWMO-2010; http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/∼tezer/ IWMO_2010/) was hosted by the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, USA, 24–26 May 2010. The collection of manuscripts resulted from this IWMO-2010 meeting are included in this special issue and have been published in Ocean Dynamics issues from May to this issue. Two important foci are highlighted in IWMO meetings: (1) international collaborations and (2) involvement of young scientists. As evident in the papers in this special issue, the co-authors of papers are often from different countries and include several graduate students and post-docs. To encourage young scientists to participate, IWMO hosts a special session for the Outstanding Young Scientist Award competition. Despite difficulties in international travel during the IWMO-2010 meeting due to the Iceland volcano eruption and increased security that prevented scientists from some countries to travel to the USA, participants from over 15 countries attended the meeting, including attendees from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. The meeting received considerable attention from the local media due to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that happened just before the meeting; a paper on the oil spill was presented in the meeting and is included in the special issue (Chang et al. 2011). The IWMO returned to Asia for the third meeting (IWMO-2011; http://www.fio. org.cn/iwmo2011/iwmo2011.htm) that has been hosted by the First Institute of Oceanography, Qingdao, China, 6–9 June 2011. The next meeting (IWMO-2012) will be hosted by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEK), Japan. The collection of 13 papers in this special issue covers a wide range of geographical domains, seven different types of ocean models, and process studies ranging in scales from a few centimeters to regional and global. The studies demonstrate the recent progress in numerical modeling: on one hand, the ability to simulate smaller and smaller scales and, on the other hand, the advancement in realistic simulations of large-scale ocean processes. Models are applied to various interdisciplinary practical problems, from the dispersion of oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the Responsible Editor: Jörg-Olaf Wolff