The model is developed and supported primarily by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA/GFDL) in Princeton, NJ, USA.
However, level coordinate models have problems when it comes to the representation of thin bottom boundary layers (Winton et al., 1998) and thick sea ice.
MOM owes its genesis to work at GFDL in the late 1960s by Kirk Bryan and Michael Cox.
[1] Further development by Pacanowski, aided by Charles Goldberg and encouraged by community feedback, led to the release of v2.0 (MOM2) in 1995.
Griffies, Matthew Harrison, Rosati and Pacanowski, with considerable input from a scientific community of hundreds of users, resulted in significant evolution of the code released as v4.0 (MOM4) in 2003.