This talk will describe a new discontinuous Galerkin model that we’ve developed for use in many geophysical fluid dynamics including: 1) the atmosphere and 2) coastal ocean; we will focus on the coastal ocean in this talk. The strengths of this model include: 1) arbitrarily high-order spatial discretization via the discontinuous Galerkin method, 2) high-order accuracy in time using both explicit and implicit-explicit time-integrators, 3) high-order wetting and drying, and 4) adaptive mesh refinement. The weakness of this model is that we are only able to use up to 4th order accuracy in time and that although the wetting and drying works for high-order polynomials, it has not been proven to be high-order accuracy. Results using an idealized tropical cyclone will be presented as well as results we have obtained for realistic tsunami simulations. The strengths and weakness of this model will be described which lead us to state some concluding remarks regarding the direction we plan to take with this new model.