COMMISSIONS AND OTHER BODIES OF THE CROATIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTS

Chair:  Mirko Orlić, F.C.A.

Secretary: Gordana Beg Paklar, Ph.D.

Administrator: Kim Sombolac, phone: +3851 4895 170, e-mail: kim@hazu.hr

INTRODUCTION

The Croatian Committee of Geodesy and Geophysics (CCGG) was founded in 1992 as a body of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (CASA). Its task is to encourage, plan, and coordinate scientific research in the field of geodesy and geophysics in the Republic of Croatia, thus enabling the participation of the Republic of Croatia in the scientific activities of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) as a body of the International Science Council (ISC).

The Republic of Croatia is in the IUGG represented by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts through this committee. To resolve scientific and administrative issues in the time between the regular general assembly sessions of the IUGG, the IUGG Executive Committee addresses the CCGG directly.

In accordance with the Statute of the IUGG, the committee covers the field of geodesy and all those subfields of geophysics that are relevant for the Republic of Croatia, namely seismology and physics of the Earth’s interior, geomagnetism and aeronomy, meteorology and atmospheric sciences, hydrology, and physical sciences of the sea.

The members of the committee are scientific and educational organizations that develop scientific activities in the field of geodesy and geophysics. The highest body of the committee is the CCGG Assembly. Its working body is the CCGG Executive Board, which operates between two assembly sessions. As a rule, the term of office of the members of that board is four years.

PERIOD 2011-2015

The CCGG Executive Board, elected at the CCGG Assembly held on 9 March 2011, consisted of: M. Orlić (Chair), B. Pribičević (Vice chair), G. Beg Paklar (Secretary) and V. Denić Jukić, T. Duplančić Leder, B. Grbec, I. Gušić, D. Herak, M. Herak, K. Horvath, V. Kuk, D. Skoko, G. Verbanac and R. Žugaj (members).

During 2011, the board first solved the problem of long-standing non-payment of Croatian membership fees in the IUGG, which preserved Croatia’s membership in this international organization. After that, the chairman of the board as a Croatian representative participated in the work of the IUGG General Assembly, which was held under the title Earth on the Edge: Science for a Sustainable Planet from 28 June to 7 July 2011 in Melbourne (Australia).

The CCGG Executive Board then decided to organize a series of one-day workshops in the coming years entitled Challenges to Contemporary Geodesy and Geophysics. Within these workshops, leading national and foreign experts discussed some fundamental problems of today, such as climate change and natural disasters. In addition, the workshops resulted in announcements that allowed the Croatian public to be informed about these problems at the level provided in many other countries by their national academies.

The first workshop was organized on 11 October 2013 in the Library Hall of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts under the title Global warming, melting of glaciers and rising of sea level. The occasion for the workshop was a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group I). The report was published at a press conference held by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on 27 September 2013 in Stockholm. The workshop enabled Croatian scientists and the public to receive information about the new report and the modern achievements of climatological research two weeks after the announcement. It was well attended and attracted a lot of media attention.

In the following years, the CCGG Executive Board maintained a relationship with the members of the committee on the one hand and with the IUGG on the other. In the period from 22 June to 2 July 2015, Croatian representatives participated in the work of the IUGG General Assembly, which was held under the title Earth and Environmental Sciences for Future Generations in Prague (Czech Republic). On that occasion, the CCGG Executive Board responded to the IUGG invitation and prepared a report on the work of Croatian geodesists and geophysicists in the four-year period that has elapsed since the previous general assembly. The report was published in the journal ‘Geofizika’.

PERIOD 2015-2019

On 27 November 2015, the CCGG Assembly was held at which a new Executive Board was elected, composed of: M. Orlić (Chair), B. Pribičević (Vice chair), G. Beg Paklar (Secretary) and I. Allegretti, Z. Bencetić Klaić, V. Denić Jukić, T. Duplančić Leder, B. Grbec, I. Gušić, D. Herak, M. Herak, M. Juračić, D. Oskoruš and G. Verbanac (members).

On Friday, 25 November 2016, a workshop entitled Hydrological forecasts in Croatia and neighbouring countries was organized in the Library Hall of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The workshop was held at a time when memories of the great floods of 2014 were still alive and when numerical modelling began as the basis for producing hydrological forecasts in Croatia. Within the two lectures and lively discussions, many topics were discussed, such as, for example, the dependence of hydrological models on meteorological models, the importance of boundary conditions – especially those provided by Slovenian colleagues, allowance for the specifics of the karst area, etc. The workshop was well attended.

The next workshop was held on Friday, 27 October 2017, under the title Satellite tracking of ground motion caused by earthquakes and some other processes. Introductory lectures have shown that geodetic satellite methods, such as GPS and InSAR, are increasingly used in Croatia in determining the deformation of the Earth’s surface before, during and after an earthquake. However, it has also been shown that the cooperation of Croatian scientists interested in such research, such as geodesists, seismologists and geologists, is still modest. After the lectures, the participants of the workshop, who filled the Library Hall of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, discussed the details of the mentioned research methods. Moreover, they criticized the seismic risk maps for the four Croatian cities, which were recently presented to the public and in which they noticed numerous shortcomings and errors.

The workshop held on Friday, 26 October 2018, was entitled How the Vela Luka meteotsunami became a scientific standard. The workshop was organized on the fortieth anniversary of the Adriatic meteotsunami of 21 June 1978, which is one of the strongest recorded in the world and therefore represents a kind of standard for comparison. The introductory lectures presented meteotsunamis in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean but also those that appear in the Great Lakes in the United States. Also discussed were the mechanisms of formation of these destructive waves, the modern way of measuring them as well as numerical modelling that lately achieved high spatial resolutions. Workshop participants commented on several other topics, such as meteotsunami risk assessment and the question of their forecast. It was emphasized that the methodology of disaster risk assessment in the Republic of Croatia will soon change and that special attention will be paid to the damage caused by floods in the coastal area.

At the end of this period, i.e., from 8 to 18 July 2019, Croatian representatives in Montreal (Canada) attended the IUGG General Assembly, which marked the centenary of the founding of this important international association. As the Croatian representative, the chair of the CCGG Executive Board participated in the work of the IUGG Council. On the other hand, several Croatian scientists presented the results of their research in the fields of meteorology, limnology, and physical oceanography, at symposia organized by the IUGG scientific associations. As usual, the CCGG Executive Board responded to the IUGG call and prepared report on the work of Croatian geodesists and geophysicists in a four-year period that has elapsed since the previous general assembly.

IUGG Council in Montreal in 2019

PERIOD 2019-2023

On 6 December 2019, the CCGG Assembly was held at which a new Executive Board was elected, composed of: M. Orlić (Chair), B. Pribičević (Vice-chair), G. Beg Paklar (Secretary) and Z. Bencetić Klaić, T. Duplančić Leder, B. Grbec, M. Juračić, I. Mandić, S. Markušić, J. Orešković, D. Oskoruš, M. Pasarić, M. Pavasović, K. Pavlić and N. Supić (members). Academician Mirko Orlić was appointed delegate of the Croatian Committee of Geodesy and Geophysics to the Council of the International Union for Geodesy and Geophysics, in the new four-year term starting from 29 January 2020.

At the end of 2019, the chairman of the CCGG Executive Board was included in the working group formed by CASA to monitor how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are being implemented. At the meetings of the working group, M. Orlić proposed that CASA should comment on climate change and prepared a draft statement. After some additions, CASA adopted Statement on Climate Changes (Croatian version) and published it on 27 May 2020. At the suggestion of I. Guettler, Ph.D. and with his active assistance, the statement was translated into English and was published under the title Statement on Climate Changes (English version). Thus, for the first time, CASA publicly presented its opinion on one of the biggest problems facing the modern world, therefore enabling the attitudes expressed in public by individual CASA fellows to be compared with the official position of the academy.

Due to the difficulties that have recently arisen in the performance of tide gauge measurements and in the publication of data collected in Croatia, meetings of the chair of the CCGG Executive Board were organized on 11 and 18 December 2020 with representatives of three relevant institutions (Department of Geophysics, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb; Hydrographic Institute of Croatia, Split; Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, Split). At the meetings, it was decided that Croatian stations, which make up a permanent tide gauge network (Rovinj, Bakar, Zadar, Split-Port, Split-Marjan, Ploče, Dubrovnik), should be maintained in continuous operation and that instruments should be regularly calibrated. Furthermore, it was concluded that the publication of the reports on tide gauge measurements should continue by compensating the backlog for the period from 2012 to 2019 and that in the future the report for some year will be published for all those stations whose data are ready for publication by 1 July of the following year. Also, it was decided to continue sending mean monthly and annual values regularly to the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (Liverpool, UK). Finally, it was agreed that extreme heights of sea level will be presented to the public by expressing them relative to the averages for the 1971.5 period (i.e., for the period 1962.2–1980.8) and by taking into account local seiches.

At the request of the CASA Management Board, the chair of the CCGG Executive Board, in cooperation with Prof. Snježana Markušić, Ph.D. and Prof. Marijan Herak, Ph.D., prepared a statement about the recent earthquakes in Croatia. On 5 January 2021, the Management Board of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts supplemented the text and published it under the title Statement of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts on seismic activity and its implications. The statement recapitulated the basic knowledge about earthquakes in Croatia, which is based on long-standing observations of earthquake damage as well as instrumental measurements that have been going on in Croatia since 1906. It was emphasized that earthquakes are impossible to predict, i.e., that four relevant questions (about place, time, magnitude, and probability) cannot be answered. On the other hand, it was pointed out that the current scientific knowledge allows three of these four questions (except the one about the time of the earthquake) to be answered, i.e., to assess the seismic hazard in an area. Therefore, it is possible to construct earthquake-prone buildings. The statement mentions three possible approaches to such construction, namely structural reinforcement of buildings, reconstruction with the use of modern materials and raising appropriate new buildings. Finally, it is stressed that recent earthquakes, as well as the pandemic and floods in Croatia, reminded of the need to educate citizens about natural disasters and to work on how to communicate with the public in such situations.

At the end of this period, i.e., from 11 to 20 July 2023, Croatian representatives in Berlin (Germany) participated in the IUGG General Assembly. As the Croatian representative, the chair of the CCGG Executive Board participated in the work of the IUGG Council. On the other hand, Croatian scientists presented the results of their research in the fields of geodesy, hydrology, limnology, physical oceanography and seismology, at symposia organized by the scientific associations of the IUGG. As before, the CCGG Executive Board responded to the IUGG call and prepared report on the work of Croatian geodesists and geophysicists in a four-year period that has elapsed since the previous general assembly.

IUGG Council in Berlin in 2023