The International Workshop for Numerical Ocean Modeling and Prediction was held at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, 23 - 25 April 2008. The workshop was organized by Yu-heng Tseng (National Taiwan University), Christopher N. K. Mooers (University of Miami), and Malcolm J. Bowman (State University of New York at Stony Brook). There were more than sixty participants representing Taiwan, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, USA and the People's Republic of China.
As the world’s population grows and the use of fossil fuels continues to increase, the Earth is experiencing significant changes to its climate and environment. This includes the melting of glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet, a thinning of the north polar ice cap (which if lost, will change the Earth’s albedo), and breaking up of the Antarctic ice shelves. In response, the sea level is beginning to rise, which, in the future, will threaten and disrupt coastal communities world-wide. The world’s oceans stabilize the Earth’s climate and play key roles in modulating and regulating climate change. Oceanographers, meteorologists, hydrologists, geodesists, geologists, fish biologists, ecologists, climate and social scientists are being called upon with increasing urgency to make more accurate predictions about these changes and their influence on human society and marine ecosystems.
As well as vast networks of in situ and remote sensing observations, high resolution, accurate and verifiable numerical ocean models are essential tools for the understanding and prediction of long-term changes in ocean circulation and mixing, marine ecosystems and fisheries, weather and climate, with El Niño, Asian monsoons, and decadal variability being three very important examples. Modeling the oceanic circulation and structure with fidelity is also critical to applications such as shipping and naval operations, harmful algal bloom abatement, ecosystem-based fisheries management, search-and-rescue, coastal inundation, oil spills and, contaminant transport and pollutant dispersal.
The workshop brought together a group of seventy-three international researchers to discuss modern ocean modeling and prediction technologies using advanced numerical models, spanning spatial scales ranging from regional coastal seas to the global ocean. The workshop focused on five major themes:
• Advances in numerical ocean modeling techniques;
• Simulations of ocean tides;
• Simulations of air-sea (atmosphere-ocean) interactions;
• Applications of ocean models;
• Skill assessments of nowcast and forecast ocean models.