Early use of the GFDL ocean model in the 1960's and early 1970's was limited to researchers within GFDL. In the early 1980's, as the number of researchers increased, Kirk Bryan convinced Mike Cox of the need for documentation and Cox proceeded to document the numerical discretizations used at that time. As a result, the Cox manual was made available in 1984 along with his code. By entraining outside researchers, the GFDL model opened itself up to a larger variety of uses. In turn, the code and manual were exposed to intense scrutiny, much of which has led to the development of numerous improvements.
With the release of MOM 1 in 1990, there were many requests for updated documentation. To satisfy this need, the core of this present document was written for the release of MOM 2 in 1995 (Pacanowski 1995). Subsequent additions and revisions by Pacanowski and Griff ies have resulted in the present document associated with the release of MOM 3.
References to MOM in the literature can be given as