The water exchange of the Baltic

Abstract

The consequences when applying Knudsen's relations on the Baltic are presented as they were formulated by B. Kullenberg who used the concepts of accumulation factor and half life time. A more general approach by B. Kullenberg and also by Stommel and Farmer is mentioned. The work by Soskin is taken up and compared with similar approaches by Jacobsen and Wyrtki. Particular interest is devoted to Soskin's ideas on the influence of long-term variations in the atmospheric circulation on the water exchange. In that connection, some old salinity data series which were recently found and which originated from Swedish light-ships during the period 1880-1922 are presented. The author then presents some of his own work in this field. A subdivision of the Baltic and adjacent seas into some 50 boxes is shown and, further, an attempt is made to determine the steady state concentrations of a release of 10,000 tons of a substance every year. A short review follows of the application to our waters of an advection-diffusion model. Some long-term salinity variations during a 100-year period are shown, then more details are presented for the period 1926-1930, and finally a computation covering a period of a few weeks is given.