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