Baltic Earth Workshop on

Hydrology of the Baltic Sea Basin: Observations, Modelling, Forecasting

St. Petersburg, Russia
8- 9 October 2019

Co-organized by State Hydrologic Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia and Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany

Workshop summary

Thank you to the organizers and participants for a great workshop! The workshop was part of the celebrations for the 100th year´s birthday of the Russian State Hydrologic Institute. 43 interested scientists from Russia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany presented and discussed current issued regarding hydrological research in the Baltic Sea region. We sincerely thank the local organizers of State Hydrologic Institute!

13 oral presentations were given, and 4 posters were shown. The abstracts provide excellent and detailed descriptions of the individual presentations and given and posters shown. Some presentations are available as pdfs in a password protected page (for access information, please contact the Baltic Earth Secretariat).

The workshop was closed by a brief discussion on current issues in hydrology in the Baltic Sea region. It was evident from the presentations and the discussion that water quality issues are on the agenda of hydrologists; this provides a link to biogeochemistry and calls for an interdisciplinary approach. It was mentioned that a recent paper (Blöschl et al. 2019), curent problems in hydrological research were discussed and identified by an international community of hydrologists, and that the questions for Baltic Sea hydrology are similar if not the same. Still, the Baltic Sea as an almost enclosed water body has its own charcteristics and issues. Questions involve the changes in time and space, natural and man-made, the variability in space and time including extremes, the processes at interfaces like coasts, the air-sea boundary, groundwater, and water quality. Sea level change is usually not in the focus of hydrologists, but it may have an influence on the water cycle of the Baltic Sea region. Related to water quality issues (nutrients, pollutants), it was hoped to arrive at a harmonization of methods and thresholds for all countries in the Baltic Sea catchment basin, as well as a free availability of data for scientific purposes.