UNESCO IOC Perth Regional Programme Office, and the GOOS Regional Alliances (GRAs) IOGOOS and SEAGOOS are exploring ways to develop regional capacities for improved ocean forecasting in the Indian Ocean and South East Asian regions. IOGOOS and SEAGOOS have expressed a desire to develop a joint pilot project that examines the potential for forecasting systems to deliver maximal societal benefit through collaborative efforts with Australia’s ocean forecasting community. To that end, one of the global suite of tools being examined for its utility in this project is Australia's BLUElink> ocean forecasting system (www.bom.gov.au/bluelink) which has been run operationally since 2007. The BLUElink> forecasting system’s 10 km resolving simulations are planned to be extended to include the entire Indian Ocean and South East Asian regions within the next 1-2 years in the research and development phase with subsequent multi-year reanalysis and operational forecasting systems scheduled in 3 years. This would therefore provide the potential for salinity, temperature, currents and sea level anomaly (BLUElink>’s standard suite of products) to be simulated in 3D at 10 km grid resolution as well as providing boundary conditions that could be used to force nested finer scale sub-regional and local scale models. The UNESCO IOC Perth Office is coordinating a collaboration between IOGOOS, SEAGOOS and the BLUElink> ocean modelling community in Australia (represented through CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology) with the aim of developing a project that would demonstrate the potential for fine scale (<10km) 3D ocean forecasting systems to be applied to the Indian Ocean and South East Asian regions. The project will involve: Capacity development in the application of ocean forecasting systems; Data mining; Observational programs to acquire and provide data essential for assimilation by forecasting systems during the pilot period; and Demonstration simulations and system performance evaluation. It is envisaged that sub-regional areas will form the basis of sub-regional demonstration projects under the overall framework of the project. Human and financial resources from the IOGOOS and SEAGOOS constituencies and from regional/external donors will be required to support the Australian BLUElink> group in order to resource the application of the forecasting system to specific areas of interest at sub-regional scales and to contribute to the performance evaluation.