ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Interdisciplinary Climate Studies
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Challenges for Baltic Sea Earth System ResearchView all 13 articles
Baltic Sea deep salinity: an initial and boundary value problem
Provisionally accepted
- Oceanography Research and Development unit, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Gothenburg, Sweden
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The Baltic Sea salinity is modelled using a two-box model. The simplistic approach allows for very long integrations where a large part of the phase space of the model can be probed. Particular emphasis is put on the salinity dynamics in the deeper parts of the sea and how they are affected by boundary and initial conditions. Multiple statistically steady states, corresponding to forcing from different years, are examined and the route to them through the model's phase space is traced out. The model is forced with freshwater fluxes and sea level variations at its boundary. The respective roles of these two forcing terms is investigated using a factorization technique, and it is found the sea level variability is the dominant one for the deep salinity dynamics. The role of natural variability is also examined, and the probability for deep salinity changes for different forcing years is computed.
Keywords: Boundary conditions, Box model, Inflows, Initial conditions, Salinity
Received: 18 Aug 2025; Accepted: 28 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Hieronymus. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Magnus Hieronymus
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