The IOC Sub-Commission for the Western Pacific (WESTPAC) held its 7th International Scientific Symposium in Sabah, Malaysia on May 21–25, 2008, and the lead author was invited to give a keynote speech on “From ocean mixing to climate change”. Somkiat Khokiattiwong from Phuket Marine Biological Center (PMBC), Thailand, also the chair of the WESTPAC-Southeast Asian Global Ocean Observing System (WESTPAC/SEAGOOS), and Fredolin Tangang from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Malaysia had a lively discussion with the lead author over the lack of OFS in Southeast Asia. Then, Tangang, Somkiat and the lead author jointly proposed the OFS project for the Southeast Asian Waters, which was evaluated and approved by the WESTPAC at its 8th Intergovernmental Session in Bali, Indonesia on May 10–13, 2010. During Phase I of the OFS project in 2010–2012, the first operational OFS for the southern region of the South China Sea was launched by Wendy Watson-Wright, Executive Secretary of the IOC and Assistant Director General of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), during the 9th Intergovernmental Session of the WESTPAC on May 9–12, 2012 in Busan, Republic of Korea. The demonstration forecasts had been broadcast since then through the website
http://221.0.186.5/IOC_WESTPAC/OFS. In addition, the Malaysian Meteorological Department (MMD) has published OFS products since March 2018 through the website
http://ideas.met.gov.my/marine.html. During Phase II of the OFS project in 2013–2015, the model domain was extended to cover the whole Southeast Asian area, the Northwest Pacific, the South China Sea and the Northeastern Indian Ocean. The OFS went into operation at Phuket Marine Biological Center (PMBC), Thailand in July 2015, and operational forecasting results have been published at
http://110.49.56.166/thailand/results.jsp. Based on this OFS, the search and rescue model was developed and was successfully applied to two boat accidents in Phuket on July 5, 2018. The accuracy of the forecasts was confirmed by the follow-up rescue, which drew a great deal of attention from many countries. The OFS results were also used to predict the outcome of the
Sanchi oil spill on January 6, 2018 (
Yin et al., 2018), and the prediction results were reported by
Nature on January 24, 2018 (
Carswell, 2018). Phase III of the OFS project started in 2016. OFS became a long-term project, and its performance has been evaluated (
Wang et al., 2016). The forecast system has been extended to cover the global ocean as FIO-COM, which has a resolution of 0.1°×0.1° and uses the data assimilation scheme of the ensemble adjustment Kalman filter (EAKF) (
Yin et al., 2011).