Simulating river flow to the Baltic Sea from climate simulations over the past millennium

The aim of this study was to reconstruct river flow to the Baltic Sea using data from different periods during the past thousand years. A hydrological model coupled to simulations from climate models was used to estimate river flow. A "millennium" simulation of past climate from the ECHO-G coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate model provided climatological inputs. Results from this global model were downscaled with the RCA3 regional climate model over northern Europe. Temperature and precipitation from the downscaled simulation results were then used in the HBV hydrological model to simulate river flows to the Baltic Sea for the periods 1000-1199 and 1551-1929. These were compared with observations for the period 1921-2002. A general conclusion from this work is that although climate has varied during the past millennium, variability in annual river flow to the Baltic Sea does not appear more pronounced in recent years than during the previous millennium, or vice versa.