The team members are: John Wilkin (role: Professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences, institution: Rutgers University); Hernan Arango (role: Research Programmer, institution: Rutgers University); Andy Moore (role: Professor of Ocean Sciences, institution: UC Santa Cruz)

Professor John Wilkin, Dr. Hernan Arango, and Professor Andy Moore together perfectly embody the AGU Flinn Award qualities for unselfish cooperation in research through their building community ocean modeling capabilities and coordinating ocean modeling access to the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), which is used by thousands of scientists around the world. They were the undisputed leaders in advancing ROMS into an open-source format with easy access, online tutorials, and free ROMS Forum advice on the MyROMS.org server. They formed the core group of key principal leaders in the community of codevelopers of ROMS, which has underpinned hundreds of research studies, leading to thousands of refereed publications involving the coastal ocean, mesoscale ocean dynamics, and physical-biological interactions controlling marine ecosystems. Every AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting and AGU Annual Meeting features dozens of talks and posters by presenters who have consequently benefited from their unselfish teamwork. Their development of the ROMS 4DVAR Data Assimilation platforms facilitated the deployment of skillful operational coastal ocean forecast systems that deliver guidance to marine environmental users around the world. Several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Centers for Environmental Prediction Operational Forecast Systems are ROMS based, including the WCOFS 4DVAR assimilating system that spans the U.S. West Coast. ROMS also offers users a highly sophisticated suite of tools to appraise the impact of observations on ocean forecasts and inform the design of ocean observing networks. They have convened more than a dozen ROMS User Workshops, half of them outside the United States, to educate novice and experienced users alike about new ROMS features and best practices in applying the model. These are open to all, including those from underprivileged sectors of our globe and underrepresented minorities of our society. They subscribe to an unselfish philosophy that every major milestone in coding progress should be promptly shared with the global community through the MyROMS.org portal. These efforts, and the almost 1 million lines of ROMS code itself, are labors of love and are a testament to their team commitment to cooperation in research to support a broad community of applied ocean modelers and all those who benefit from skillful ocean model analysis and prediction. Their influence is truly international in scale and multidisciplinary in extent, including simulating physical oceanographic coupling to ecosystems, biogeochemistry, geomorphology, and interactive couplings to sea ice, waves, and atmosphere dynamics. The global ocean modeling community applauds and thanks this team of innovative and generous scientists for their fundamental contributions to our community-wide ocean modeling capabilities and successes. —Arthur J. Miller, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California