Although we are all aware of the relevance of ocean-atmosphere interactions at local and global scale, and of their importance in a changing climate context, historically the modeling of atmosphere, waves and ocean fields have been treated separately, most often in a one-way coupled context.
In such cases the atmosphere generally provides the forcing for the upper ocean, or is used to obtain the surface wave wind filed, but typically there is no mutual feedback among the three compartments, treated as boundary of each other.
Only recently a new area of numerical modeling has been growing, combining the dynamics of ocean, atmosphere and waves in a fully two-way exchange context. These efforts started providing more reliable short-to-medium range predictions, and contributed to shed light on the energy redistribution between the different sectors.
There is now a strong need to thoroughly assess such coupled numerical tools, investigate their limitations and extract the related information that may help understanding the global climate system.

The session welcomes:
overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field at European and International level;
examples of development of coupled models at regional and global scale;
discussion of metrics and ensemble approach to assess coupled model performances;
examples of hindcast studies highlighting the energy interplay and distributions between atmosphere, waves and ocean;
examples demonstrating how the coupled approach can improve the understanding of fundamental processes.