Representative Catalogue of the Neva Floods. Construction Principles

The Neva floods should be studied as a phenomenon, the origin and characteristics of which are the result of direct and indirect manifestations of natural factors that differ significantly in their spatiotemporal scales. The problem should be approached interdisciplinary. In the process of studying historical the Neva floods scientific principles were formulated for constructing a representative flood catalogue, which has not yet been created, which creates additional difficulties in studying the evolution of the hydrodynamic system that includes Ladoga Lake, the Neva and the Gulf of Finland: a comprehensive methodological approach to solving the problem; unconditional priority of primary sources; refusal to “correct” historical series post factum; cataloguing typos and discrepancies in versions for the entire period of observations; development and implementation into practice of a unified program for assessing the representativeness of series; search for new information on water level observations.