L-R: John Wilkin, professor in the Rutgers Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences (DMCS), Andrew Moore, professor at University of California-Santa Cruz, and Hernan Arango, research programmer at DMCS, were honored by the American Geophysical Union.
Rutgers scientists John Wilkin, professor, and Hernan Arango, research programmer, in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences (DMCS) along with Andrew Moore, professor at University of California-Santa Cruz, have been honored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) with its 2025 Edward A. Flinn III Award.
A coveted AGU honor for mid-career or senior scientists, the Edward A. Flinn III Award honors individuals or small groups who build and maintain the essential infrastructure that allows Earth and space science research to flourish.
The trio of “unsung heroes” was recognized at AGU25 in New Orleans, LA. from Dec. 15 to 19 for their work in building community ocean modeling capabilities and coordinating global ocean modeling access to the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS).
“ROMS is one of the most advanced multidisciplinary ocean modeling frameworks available, thanks to the contributions of esteemed colleagues who have collaborated with us. From the beginning, it was designed to be public and free, with no restrictions on use, including commercial applications,” said Arango, who has been a part of the DMCS scientific community at Rutgers for the past 30 years.
Wilkin expressed that it was gratifying to receive the recognition of their efforts championing a culture of open science in ocean modeling but emphasized that they “are a small cadre at the center of a much larger community who have contributed their varied expertise to the ROMS modeling enterprise.”
AGU2025 Edward A. Flinn III Award recipients, L-R: Andrew Moore, Hernan Arango, and John Wilkin, pictured at the Ocean Modeling Group (OMG!) lab at Rutgers. The trio met for a week in October 2025 to work on training the extended Rutgers OMG community on using our latest tools for ocean data analysis and forecasting. Photo courtesy of John Wilkin.
By embracing unselfish knowledge sharing in ocean modeling, the ROMS community is empowering others with tools for further discovery, which is a rewarding legacy for decades of work,” Wilkin said.
Moore has known and worked with Wilkin for over 30 years, and he echoed the sentiment.
“It is a great privilege to belong to the vibrant ROMS community, and to have worked with so many amazing and talented people over the years, including of course my longtime collaborators John and Hernan who set the stage for everything that ROMS has become long before I came on the scene. I am proud of our achievements and delighted that we have been recognized in this way,” said Moore.
Wilkin underscored the long collegial relationship among the trio of scientists. Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2001, he worked with Arango in the 1990s.
“In science, close colleagues are often equally close friends. Andy and I have been acquainted since our early careers in Australia. Often in science, professional is entwined with personal, and I don’t think this team could have accomplished what we have if working together weren’t such a joy,” he said.
Wilkin and Arango championed the value of open science for ocean simulation modeling some two decades ago by creating the myroms.org community portal for knowledge exchange. They successfully challenged other ocean modeling communities to engage in systematic ocean model comparison tests, to everyone’s benefit.
Concurrently, Moore and Arango were working as fundamental developers of advanced variational data assimilation in ocean forecasting, transferring the best practices of weather forecasting to coastal ocean models.
The 2025 AGU recognition highlights the work to which they’ve dedicated more than 25 years of their professional careers, explained Arango.
“The first version of the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) was made available to users worldwide on January 20, 1999. It has greatly influenced the education and training of future scientists, resource management, navigation, search and rescue operations, forecasting and community involvement,” he said.
The trio of scientists embrace the open-source, open-science paradigm, releasing early and often their algorithms, methods, and computer code developments to users for experimentation, often at the expense of recognition in conventional science peer review publishing. They’ve integrated their developments into NOAA frameworks for forecasting and data analysis to improve skill in ocean forecasting, to protect environmental health and safeguard lives at sea.
“ROMS has been used extensively to explore and understand the circulation along the U.S. west coast. Some years ago, we developed a long ocean reanalysis of the California Current system using ROMS which has been widely used by the marine science community for a broad range of applications including understanding cetacean density, fisheries recruitment, and seasonal climate variations,” said Moore.
And that work goes on, according to Wilkin.
“For me, it has been a joy to work alongside Hernan and Andy, developing, coding and debugging, but also teaching new users at the many workshops we’ve hosted around the world. It has been fun, and we aren’t done yet.”
