The Puget Sound basin is a unique physical, social and economic environment. It is a landscape that literally spans the full range of biophysical provinces from coastal urban areas and near-shore habitats to permanent glacier fields and active volcanoes. The Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model (PRISM) at the University of Washington is a new approach to interdisciplinary research overcoming the limits of individual disciplines with a new vision of shared data and coupled models. The PRISM project strategy is to build a shared modeling environment that is both physically and temporally explicit in describing the biophysical and the social processes that shape the Puget Sound Region. The central elements of this numeric modeling environment are linkages between UW Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model (MM5v3.5) meteorological forecasts, the hydrological overland and streamflow estimates of the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM), and the marine circulation from the Princeton Ocean Model (POM). These linked models share a common spatial domain and form the template for explicit models for water supply and demand (The Cascade Regional Yield Simulation and Analysis Model - CRYSTAL), nearshore ecosystem processes (NearPRISM), and Aquatic Biogeochemistry and the marine foodweb complex (ABC). This presentation will provide an overview of this project and address the applications of this approach to the data and information needs of the Puget Sound community. We will review the existing models, their performance and present results from their application.