Introduction

Abstract

Modelling the ocean using large mainframe computers is a young science. After WWII, John von Neumann encouraged the meteorological community to use the first general purpose computers for numerical weather prediction. For the past 35 years, atmospheric scientists have had early access to each generation of faster computers. In meteorology, the majority of graduate students have used computers to test models or analyze large data bases collected by the world wide meteorological community or special field programs. In oceanography the story is quite different. Scientists at oceanographic institutions did not encourage their students to use the computer for models. However in meteorogical laboratories, such as GFDL, NCAR, NPG, UCLA, etc., several meteorologists were enlisted to build ocean circulation models. They anticipated the requirement to build coupled ocean-atmospheric models to study the earth’s climate. After 1970, a small number of university professors in the U.S. and Europe recognized that fast computers are powerful for understanding ocean circulation using numerical solutions of partial differential equations.