Most of the contributions addressed cross-discipline topics, underlining the interdisciplinary nature of the conference and BALTEX in general. The idea of BALTEX was born and brought to life about twenty years ago. The intention was to install a European research programme within the newly designed Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), with the Baltic Sea drainage basin as a challenging region to investigate the water and energy cycles in a major continental-scale catchment. Since then, a lot has happened. Projects were designed and executed, data were collected and analyzed, papers were written, networks

and friendships were Selleckchem LY2835219 formed. With time, merited people left the programme for new challenges, and new people came, bringing in new ideas and networks. After about 10 years, Phase II was launched, extending the scope to climate variability and change, provision of tools for water management and coping with extreme events, biogeochemical this website changes, and more applied

and societal topics like education and outreach. Now, after twenty years of successful research and scientific networking, BALTEX was terminated at this conference, as scheduled. At the same time, the conference was a stepping stone for Baltic Earth. The new programme stands firmly in the BALTEX tradition of fostering the free collaboration between research groups from different countries and scientific disciplines in response to common research questions. Baltic Earth inherits the BALTEX network, infrastructure and scientific legacy, but will have its own slightly modified agenda (see www.baltic-earth.eu). The selected papers in this volume reflect the interdisciplinary approach and at the same time symbolize the transition from the ‘old’ BALTEX

to the ‘young’ Baltic Earth generation: both communities are represented by authors in this issue. We would like to thank the Polish editors of OCEANOLOGIA for giving us the opportunity to publish our conference proceedings here for the second time, after 2011, and for the smooth and professional Pembrolizumab in vitro processing. As Baltic Earth will continue the tradition of conferences similar to BALTEX, we are looking forward to a possible new collaboration in a few years. “
“According to the description in IPCC (2001) the climate system is an interactive system which contains different components such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere (the oceans and river systems), different ice forms on the Earth’s surface, land surface and all ecosystems. All of these components interact with each other. In order to simulate the climate system, all of them, therefore, need to be taken into account.