The Poseidon Project team has submitted a commentary about the opportunities and challenges posed by increasingly powerful ocean circulation models. The abstract reads:
Computational Oceanography is the study of ocean phenomena by numerical simulation, especially dynamical and physical phenomena. Progress in information technology has driven exponential growth in the number of global ocean observations and the fidelity of numerical simulations of the ocean in the past few decades. The growth has been exponentially faster for ocean simulations, however. We argue that this faster growth is shifting the importance of field measurements and numerical simulations for oceanographic research. It is leading to the emergence of Computational Oceanography as a branch of marine science on par with observational oceanography. Although some specific limits and challenges exist, many opportunities are identified for the future of Computational Oceanography. Most important is the prospect of hybrid computational and observational approaches to advance understanding of the ocean.
The manuscript is being considered as an Essay by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. You can read the preprint here.
