Extreme separations of bottle posts in the southern Baltic Sea – tentative interpretation of an experiment-of-opportunity

During an experiment-of-opportunity in July 2019, 27 drift bottles were released in the southern Baltic Sea. Ten of these bottles were found and reported at locations that were surprisingly widespread. In this study, we explore the chances to reproduce these findings with a numerical drift model. While trajectories may be considered as completely deterministic, in practice their prediction as well as reconstruction has a strong stochastic component, because of ubiquitous gradients on even the smallest scales. We illustrate different aspects of uncertainty including specification of leeway, random dispersion, and stretching along Lagrangian coherent structures. By and large, the results of numerical ensemble simulations seem to be in reasonable agreement with the observational evidence available. Some drift bottle findings suggest a bias in simulations, but without knowing the drift bottles’ full drift paths, a basis for more detailed model tuning is missing.