Ocean drift activities at MET Norway

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The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has a national responsibility to provide oceanic drift forecasts for several applications: oil spills, search & rescue, drifting ships, nuclear waste, ice berg, etc.
OpenDrift was developed in order to serve all these application with a single framework, for efficient development and maintenance.
It is however a strict criteria that OpenDrift shall be generic, without any bindings to specific institutes, users or geographical regions. This facilitates flexibility to engage and cooperate in any kinds of activities and research projects worldwide.
External users with a variety of applications and needs contribute significantly by detecting bugs and weaknesses, and suggesting improvements for benefit of all. Code contributions as pull requests are also highly welcome, but should be of general interest/usage.

On top of the OpenDrift software, MET Norway provide a self-service web interface for external users (halo.met.no), which is based on a web service (http://beta.drifty.met.no, OpenAPI v3). This is however restricted to governmental users.
As a backup solution to this web interface, forecasters at MET Norway are also using the built-in graphical user interface for ocean drift tasks.

The various drift modules which are bundled within the OpenDrift framework are not all developed in house, but are to a large degree based on algorithms and parameterisations from open scientific literature. References to these are found in the code, but will eventually be better highlighted in future improved documentation.