The 8th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO) takes place in Bologna, July 7-10 2016.
The 8th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO 2016) was held on June 7–10, 2016, at one of the oldest universities in Europe—the University of Bologna in Italy (founded 1088 A.D.). The workshop returned to Europe for the second time (the other European IWMO was held in Norway in 2013; Berntsen et al. 2014). Since the establishment of the IWMO in 2009 (Oey et al. 2010a, b), meetings were held four times in Asia, two times in Europe, two times in North America, one time in Australia, and for the 10th anniversary of IWMO, the 2018's meeting will be held in South America (Brazil) for the first time.
The 2016 IWMO meeting celebrated the 20-year anniversary since the first Princeton Ocean Model (POM) users' group meeting held in June 1996 at Princeton. The early POM users’ group meetings led to the establishment of the IWMO in 2009. The IWMO expands to include different models and a very wide range of topics involving the ocean and its coupled interaction with other aspects of the earth's environment, as can be seen from this and previous IWMO meeting agendas and related publications. The 20th anniversary event was noted by presentations on the history of ocean modeling over these two decades and an award given by The Historical Oceanography Society to Professor Emeritus George Mellor for his pioneering contribution to turbulence modeling (Mellor and Yamada 1974, 1982), coastal ocean modeling (Blumberg and Mellor 1983), and the development of POM (Blumberg and Mellor 1987), which led the way for many other community ocean models that exist today.
About 80 scientists attended the IWMO 2016 meeting, which included nine keynote distinguished speakers, ~ 65 oral presentations, and ~ 25 posters. Continuing with the IWMO tradition, students and postdocs participated in the Outstanding Young Scientist Award competition.The meeting covered a wide range of topics in ocean modeling, analysis, and processes, and this special issue of Ocean Dynamics represents a collection of 18 peer reviewed papers from participants of IWMO-2016. The papers went through rigorous reviews as regular papers in Ocean Dynamics, with the help of reviewers from IWMO members as well as external experts.
OYSA winners of IWMO 2016