Baltic Sea Ice Climate Workshop 2005 
16 
The Five Workshops 
First (1993, August): Tvarminne, Finland 
The first workshop was held in the Tvarminne Zoological Station of the University of Helsinki. 
The organisers were Dr. Jari Haapala and the present author. Participants came from all Baltic 
Sea shoreline countries except Denmark, altogether 36: 5 from Estonia, 15 from Finland, 1 
from Germany, 1 from Latvia, 1 from Lithuania, 4 from Poland, 6 from Russia, and 3 from 
Sweden. The presentations filled two and a half days, with one half-day reserved for an 
excursion to the town of Hanko (Fig. 1). This is a historical sea ice site since the first all-year 
ship route was opened between Hanko and Stockholm in 1877. Also the Russian tsar had built 
a railroad there from St. Petersburg because of the feasibility of Hanko as a winter harbour. 
Fig. 1. The participants of the First Baltic Sea Ice Workshop, gathered at the Hanko Casino in 
the excursion. 
In the first day mathematical modelling of sea ice in the Baltic Sea and the ice climate problem 
were discussed, and the second day was devoted to ice and related climatological time series. 
In the last day other ice related topics such as remote sensing of sea ice and the St. Petersburg 
dam ice problems were treated. Most of the presentations were collected in the workshop 
proceedings, together with the workshop recommendations and decisions (Lepparanta and 
Haapala, 1993). 
As a practical result, a decision was made to establish a data base IDA for Baltic Sea ice 
climate investigations, open for all researchers to contribute and to utilize (Haapala et al., 
1996). The focus was on three particular ice season to serve foe model calibration: normal 
(1983/1984), severe (1986/1987) and mild (1991/1992). Also an initiative was made to start 
joint climatological ice time series data collection and analysis, to produce result only almost 
ten years later (Jevrejeva et al., 2002; 2004). Finally, the participants agreed to have the 
second workshop in Estonia.