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POAMA (Predictive Ocean Atmosphere Model for Australia) is a state-of-the-art coupled ocean/atmosphere model seasonal forecast system developed jointly by the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre (BMRC), Melbourne and CSIRO Marine Research (CMR), Hobart, in a project partly funded by the Climate Variability in Agriculture Program (CVAP). It is based on the latest version of BMRC’s unified climate/Numerical Weather Prediction atmosphere model (BAM) and the Australian Community Ocean Model (ACOM2). The POAMA system uses a sophisticated ocean data assimilation system that incorporates the latest oceanic observations into the initialisation procedure for the model forecasts. It is also one of the few models that uses real atmospheric data, taken from the Bureau’s operational weather forecast system. One of its unique features is that it always uses the very latest oceanic and atmospheric data.