Frontiers in Earth Science | www.frontiersin.org
1
February 2020 | Volume 8 | Article 7
Ir frontiers
in Earth Science
REVIEW
published: 05 February 2020
doi: 10.3389/feart .2020.00007
Baltic Sea Operational
Oceanography—A Stimulant for
Regional Earth System Research
Jun She H. E. Markus Meier 23 , Miroslaw Darecki 4 , Patrick Gorringe 3 , Vibeke Huess 1 ,
Tarmo Kouts 5 , Jan Hinrich Reissmann 6 and Laura Tuomi 7
’ Department of Research and Development, Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark, 3 Leibniz Institute for
Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Rostock, Germany, 3 Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Norrkdping,
Sweden, 4 Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences (IOPAN), Sopot, Poland, 5 Department of Marine Systems,
Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, 6 Marine Sciences, Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency, Hamburg,
Germany, 7 Marine Research Unit, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland
OPEN ACCESS
Edited by:
Klaus D. Joehnk,
Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO), Australia
Reviewed by:
Anna Rutgersson,
Uppsala University, Sweden
Beata Szymczycha,
Institute of Oceanology (PAN), Poland
Correspondence:
Jun She
js@dmi.dk
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Interdisciplinary Climate Studies,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Earth Science
Received: 14 January 2019
Accepted: 16 January 2020
Published: 05 February 2020
Citation:
She J, Meier HEM, Darecki M,
Gorringe R Huess V, Kouts T,
Reissmann JH and Tuomi L (2020)
Baltic Sea Operational
Oceanography—A Stimulant for
Regional Earth System Research.
Front. Earth Sol. 8:7.
doi: 10.3389/feart.2020.00007
Two important communities related to oceanography in the Baltic Sea are those working
on operational oceanography and Earth system science, with focusing on the same
water body but different temporal scales. They have been coordinated through two
organizations/programs: the Baltic Sea Operational Oceanographic System (BOOS) and
the Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX) and Its successor, the Baltic Earth Program (Earth
system science for the Baltic Sea region), respectively. Although the two communities
have archived significant progresses In their own fields since early 1990s, there
were few interactions between the communities. Rapid advancements of operational
oceanography on ocean monitoring, data sharing, modeling, and historical ocean state
reconstruction in the last decade have provided a wide range of data, products and
modeling tools which may be used In Earth system and climate change research. This
Is especially true when operational oceanography in the Baltic Sea Is In a transition to a
seamless service, I.e., from basin to local scales, from synoptic to climate scales and from
physical to blogeochemical and biological systems. On the other hand, the Baltic Sea
Earth system research can help to improve operational oceanography by contributing
research observations and transferring their research achievements to the operational
system. Based on a review of state-of-the-art of BOOS monitoring and modeling
capabilities and on-going BOOS research, this paper will highlight topics and areas
which are related to the Baltic Earth Grand Challenges, I.e., salinity dynamics, land-sea
blogeochemical linkages, natural hazards and extreme events, sea level dynamics,
coastal morphology and erosion, regional variability of water and energy exchanges,
and multi-drivers of regional Earth system changes. Potential win-win cooperation and
interaction between the BOOS and the Baltic Earth communities are also proposed
and discussed.
Keywords: operational oceanography, Baltic Sea, BOOS, observational networks, seamless modeling, earth
system study, Baltic Earth