for information on the past meetings and future planned meetings.Halifax is the largest city on the east coast of Canada, an international seaport and the center of maritime and marine science. Located between the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Bay of Fundy on the southwest (where the highest tide in the world is found), Halifax nicely symbolizes the spirit of IWMO of innovative ocean modeling research that addresses both large-scale open ocean circulation and small-scale coastal processes.More than 80 researchers from 15 countries attended the workshop, which included about 65 oral presentations and 15 posters. The oral and poster presentations covered a wide range of ocean modeling and analysis issues and different geographical locations from the South China Sea and Tokyo Bay to the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. Continuing the tradition of IWMO in encouraging the participation of young scientists, about 20 graduate students and postdocs participated in the competition for the Outstanding Young Scientist Award.The collection of 13 papers in this Special Issue underwent the same rigorous review process as regular papers of Ocean Dynamics. The reviews were solicited from both the workshop attendees and the scientific community at large. The papers in this issue mainly focus on four major geographic regions:(1) Five papers addressed modeling of ocean surface gravity waves, sea ice, tides, and storm surges along the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, near Canadian coasts in the vicinity of the location of the meeting (Guo and Sheng 2015;Prasad et al. 2015;Rao et al. 2016; Xu 2015a, b). (2) Four papers addressed observations and modeling of semi-enclosed seas and bays along the western coasts of the Pacific Ocean, such as the South China Sea and the Tokyo Bay Lu et al. 2015;Sun et al. 2015;Wang et al. 2015a).