2011 Coastal Ocean Modeling Gordon Research Conference

Intellectual Merit: Gordon Research Conferences have an excellent recipe for success, developed over decades and hundreds of conferences across the scientific disciplines. The Gordon Foundation provides substantial cost sharing and infrastructure support, and additional contributions are solicited from private foundations and federal agencies. Program chairs, elected by the community, form a program committee which invites leading researchers to present critical summaries of a range of important problems and to highlight the latest developments. Discussion leaders have also been recruited to stimulate and moderate discussion among the participants. Most people who attend the conference report that it is the best science conference they have attended in the past year.

This particular Gordon conference on Coastal Ocean Modeling is held every four years in a retreat setting (this year at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA). It brings together a diverse group of academic, federal and international researchers to share the latest discoveries and identify new challenges in coastal ocean modeling. Many of the topics explored in this conference (e.g. advances in numerics, nearshore modeling, mesoscale processes, ecosystem dynamics) are directly relevant to NSF research areas.

Broader Impacts: The most important broad impact of the conference is the establishment and nurturing of relationships between senior researchers and students/junior researchers. Because nearly half of the conference time is allocated to informal interactions among participants, and because Gordon Research Conferences are held in retreat-like locations, there is unparalleled opportunity to build these relationships and exchange ideas among people in not only different age groups, but also in different sub-areas of the field, or in different geographic regions.