Regional ocean-atmosphere coupled models (ROAMs) are an important tool for understanding the impacts of regional air-sea interactions on monsoon variability, as well as for the dynamical downscaling of global climate models. A review is presented on the development and application of a ROAM developed at the State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG), Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, named FROALS (Flexible Regional Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System model). The major advantage of FROALS is that it consists of two atmospheric model components and two oceanic model components. By using this flexible model system, the effects of different atmospheric model components and different oceanic model components on the ROAM simulations over the western North Pacific have been investigated. Results suggest that simulated biases in FROALS are mainly contributed by the atmospheric model component. The cold biases of simulated SST in FROALS are significantly reduced when the convection suppression criterion is applied. The advanced FROALS shows reasonable performance over the western North Pacific. The climatology and interannual variability of upper-level ocean currents over the western North Pacific are reproduced well. Compared with the uncoupled simulation, the regionally coupled simulation exhibits improvements in the interannual variability of rainfall and tropical cyclone genesis potential index over the WNP. Finally, FROALS has been used to dynamically downscale the present-day climate simulation and future climate projections of the IAP/LASG global climate system model. Preliminary analysis indicates that the regional climate over East Asia derived from FROALS is better than those derived from global climate models and the uncoupled regional model, indicating that FROALS has good application prospects over this region.