Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of EFM

Introduction to the article: In the early 1990s a small group of us began to discern that a community of scholars was coalescing on the topic of natural flow processes as they pertain to the quality of our aquatic systems and atmospheric environment. There existed venues for the publication of our research in vanguard journals such as Tellus (1949–), Journal of Marine Sciences (1926–) and Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics (1971–). These excellent journals, however, generally carried articles related to larger scale fluid motions affected by earth’s rotation such as weather and oceanic circulation, which are considered in the realm of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. Leading fluid mechanics journals such as the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (1956–), Physics of Fluids (1958–), and Proceedings of the Royal Society (1800–), too, carried papers of fundamental research applied, or applicable, to natural flows but the scope of these journals was broad.