China published ocean forecasting system for the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road on December 10, 2018

1 The unique ocean forecasting system (OFS) based on FIO-COM The OFS is based on the surface wave-tide-circulation coupled ocean model developed by the First Institute of Oceanography (FIO-COM), Ministry of Natural Resources, China. The half-century challenge that ocean circulation models must address is that the forecasting/simulated sea surface temperature overheats while the sub-surface temperature is too cold, especially during the summer. Qiao et al.(2004, 2010, 2016) found that the non-breaking surface wave can generate turbulence through wave-turbulence interaction, and they developed the wave-induced mixing theory, which has been confirmed by observations, laboratory experiments and model numerical simulations. As validated by ocean circulation models from various research groups, including Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in the US (Fan and Griffies, 2014), Uppsala University of Sweden (Wu et al., 2015), Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiale (LEGOS) in France (Malek and Babanin, 2014), Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary (Peter and Kramer, 2016) and the Ocean University of China (Lin et al., 2006), the non-breaking surface waveinduced vertical mixing (Bv) can always dramatically improve the simulation capacity of various ocean circulation models. The First Institute of Oceanography (FIO) research group found that tidal-induced mixing plays a key role in the formation of coastal upwelling, in the bottom mixed layer and in areas with sea mounts (Lv et al., 2006, 2008). With the above breakthroughs, the first surface wavetide-circulation coupled model of FIO-COM was developed in 2013. It was adopted to produce a reanalysis dataset for the period of January 2014 to April 2016, and it has been used for the operational OFS since May 2016. A highly efficient parallel scheme was designed to use the full capacity of Taihu Light with 10 649 600 CPU cores (Qiao et al., 2016), which earned a finalist nomination for the international Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize.

Introduction of the special issue on the 10th WESTPAC International Scientific Conference

This special issue is the scientific legacy of the 10th WESTPAC International Scientific Conference, which was sponsored by State Oceanic Administration of China and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, and organized by the IOC Sub- Commission for the West Pacific (WESTPAC) and the First Institute of Oceanography of China, which was held in Qingdao, China during 17–20 April 2017 with more than 700 participants from 21 countries. During the conference, the international scientific steering committee announced the special issue of Acta Oceanologica Sinica for building a scientific legacy. Forty-five manuscripts were submitted with 20 papers accepted for this special issue.