This regional focus results in a different suite of questions and a different range of modeling issues. Several specific modeling problems were identified within this regional focus. The complexity of the Antarctic food web poses additional problems for incorporating the biological components into coupled models. It was suggested that a hierarchy of food web models of increasing complexity be developed. This is a long-term research problem that is not limited to analyses of the Antarctic food web.
All models suffer from sub-grid scale representations of biological and physical processes.
The time and space scales of importance for many of the biological processes, and several of the physical processes, are within this sub-grid scale. This creates serious research issues in the development of coupled models in general. For many issues, regional models are the appropriate tool. In particular, regional models are especially valuable for the study of specific processes. However, regional models in the Southern Ocean are faced with several challenges, including boundary conditions, model initialization, ice dynamics, coverage of the full seasonal cycle, shelf drainage, and bottom water formation.