Editorial—The 3rd International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO 2011)

The 3rd International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO; http://service.fio.org.cn/iwmo2011/iwmo2011.htm) was held on June 6–9, 2011 in the beautiful seaport city of Qingdao, hosted by the First Institute of Oceanography, China. The year was marred by the tragic March 11 Tōhoku earthquake a few months before the workshop. This special issue is dedicated to the Japanese people, who despite the enormity of their sufferings, showed immense resilience and fortitude. Approximately 100 researchers worldwide participated in the Workshop. There were over 80 oral presentations and posters covering, as in past workshops, a broad range of topics on modeling, analysis and observation from smallscale turbulence, waves and air–sea–ice physics to regional, basin and climate-scale processes, and from sediment transport to coupled physical–biogeochemical dynamics. A record of approximately 20 graduate students and postdoctoral students participated in the Outstanding Young Scientist Competition befitting to the spirit and overall goal of the workshop to encourage young scientists to participate. The collection of eight papers in this special issue was selected from a total of approximately 30 originally submitted after they underwent the usual process of reviews and revisions. There were at least two reviewers for each paper, but a few of the submissions had three or four reviewers. Some of the reviews were from the workshop attendees, but many were solicited from the scientific community at large. The subjects of papers in this special issue include four on data assimilations—hindcast and/or test forecast (i.e., using past data but without data assimilation; Isobe et al. 2012; Miyazawa et al. 2012; Yin et al. 2012; Yao et al. 2012), one on process sensitivity (Xing et al. 2012), one on ice floe observation with modeling (Shu et al. 2012), and two on processes with observational and modeling analyses (Ezer et al. 2012; Wada et al. 2012). Isobe and co-authors (Kako, Guo, and Takeoka) nest a high-resolution finite-volume model (FVCOM; 1 km near the coast) within the Japan Coastal Ocean Predictability Experiment’s (JCOPE2) 1/12°×1/12° reanalysis of the Kuroshio. They conducted test-forecasts of warm intrusion events into the Bungo Channel (132 E and 33 N) south of Japan as Kuroshio’s frontal waves meander close to the shelfbreak—a challenging feat on account of the sporadic and highly chaotic nature of the processes involved. The ensemble breeding method is used. The experiments successfully predict the occurrences of three observed intrusion events in 2010. The authors suggested that improved lateral boundary conditions from JCOPE2 assimilated with Argo data may further improve the results by eliminating false events produced by the model’s (imperfect) physics. Miyazawa and co-authors (Miyama, Varlamov, Guo, and Waseda) conducted hindcasts of the Kuroshio and coastal circulation south of Japan from January–March of 2010 focusing in the Kii Channel (135 E and 33.6 N) where a Responsible Editor: Jörg-Olaf Wolff