Technological developments and multi-disciplinary intercrosses led the current physical oceanography having a broader connotation than the conventional one. World Ocean Circulation Experiment finished in 2002 after the 20-year on-going with huge output both in bibliography and field observations. Under the development and application of observational techniques, high-tech instruments and numerical methods, ocean regions with rare observation or out of our touch before, such as Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, polar region, deep ocean ridge, etc., become the new, hot research fields. Studies on those fields reveal a series of scientific issues associated with climate changes, such as strong mixing nearby ocean ridge in the deep water, new processes of the ocean-atmospheres interaction, effects of fresher and lighter water, and so on. Time-dependent oceanic processes associated with climate changes become one of decisive contents in this field. The overseas advances in physical oceanography during 2002 covered many directions related with large scale dynamic processes, including thermohaline circulation, ocean mixing, interdecadal and even long term oceanic variability, Indian ocean climatic variability, ocean salinity vs. climate variability, palaeooceanography, and ocean modeling, etc., which illuminate the future of physical oceanography. It is noticeable that all achievements of those researches were made under a series of international cooperation plans and long term stable financial supports. Scientific foresights and appropriate financial assignments were fundamental to those achievements. So this paper tries to carry a message that any innovative achievements in physical oceanography study in China in the future must depend on the broad cooperation between different disciplines and between different research directions.