BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Interdisciplinary Climate Studies
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1601433
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Challenges for Baltic Sea Earth System ResearchView all 10 articles
Hydro-Climatic Variations, Changes, and Extremes in the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin
Provisionally accepted
- 1Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
It is largely unknown, yet essential for the Baltic Sea state, the nutrient and pollutant loads from land, and the coastal-marine ecosystem health how freshwater discharges to the sea and their drought and flood extremes vary and change over the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin (BSDB). Based on four different (types of) datasets, we here compare these variations and changes over 1980-2010 across 69 large hydrological catchments in the BSDB. The datasets agree that the precipitation changes over the study period do not necessarily propagate to analogous changes for runoff and related discharges to the sea, with results showing various contrasting precipitation and runoff changes. The datasets differ markedly in that some model-based reanalysis datasets yield directly opposite water balance closures, implying persistent 30-year average regional storage wetting or drying depending on the dataset. For droughts and floods, dataset differences are overall greater for runoff than for precipitation, and widely used reanalysis data do not fully capture how extremely high and low flood-and drought-related runoff fluxes can be, as observed in the BSDB. These findings are important for plans and preparations to mitigate and/or adapt to changes and extremes in the Baltic freshwater conditions and discharges to the sea.
Keywords: Baltic Sea, Freshwater discharges, Precipitation and discharge extremes, Droughtand flood extremes, water balance, Hydro-climatic and reanalysis data
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Destouni and Zarei. 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: Georgia Destouni, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.