A summary of Ocean Dynamics (ODYN) activities in 2023 must first start with the sad news of the passing of Prof. Dr. Jörg-Olaf Wolff (1959–2023), the founder of the journal who served as Editor-in-Chief for over 20 years – for all his numerous professional achievements and long-term service to Ocean Dynamics, please see the published memoriam (Ezer 2023).

The editors of Ocean Dynamics (ODYN) would like to express appreciation and many thanks to the 220 reviewers from thirty-six different countries who spent time and effort to evaluate manuscripts in 2023 (special appreciation is due to the many reviewers who provided multiple reviews during the year). The diligent contribution by reviewers is essential for maintaining the goals of ODYN in publishing the highest quality research papers on theoretical, computational, observational, and interdisciplinary oceanography. As recognition of this invaluable service, Springer Nature offers reviewers the opportunity to credit the contribution to their profiles on ORCiD or Publons-Web of Science. However, for privacy concerns, we do not publish the names of reviewers here.

Since 2020, ODYN, like many other journals, experienced the impact of the COVID pandemic in declining submissions which strongly related to the cancellation of conferences that provided papers for special issues. However, in 2023, after 3 years of decline in the number of submitted and published manuscripts, the number of published papers has increased by ~ 15% from the prior year. With the return of in-person international conferences after 3 years hiatus, ODYN started publishing again special issues (Topical Collections)—the first published collection after the pandemic was the 12th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean in Michigan (IWMO-2022; Wang et al. 2024), while three other collections are now in progress—IWMO-2023 from a meeting in Hamburg, the Coastal Ocean and Shelf Seas Task Team (COSS-TT) from a meeting in Montreal, and the 19th meeting of Asia Oceania Geosciences Society on global Western Boundary Currents (AOGS-WBC) from a meeting in Singapore.

We would like to thank the guest editors who helped manage the topical collections (listed alphabetically): Mauro Cirano, Tomasz Dabrowski, Cristina Forbes, Marjolaine Krug, Alexander Kurapov, Xiaopei Lin, Xin Liu, Akiro Nagaro, Janet Sprintall, Joanna Staneva, and Cesar Villanoy.

We also thank the dedicated editorial and production staff of Springer Nature who provided essential services to ODYN- Ron Doering, Lanie Mabanan and Christian Brian Abueva.