St. Petersburg is the maritime capital of Russia. Institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, industry, the Navy and universities providing maritime activities of the country are located here. This has been the basis for the creating in 1996 of the Scientific Council on Problems of Fundamental and Applied Hydrophysics at the St. Petersburg Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The activity of the Council was aimed at uniting the efforts of St. Petersburg organizations in solving scientific problems in the field of hydrophysics, important also for the Russian Navy. Scientific and technical conferences “Applied technologies of hydroacoustics and hydrophysics" were held under the auspices of the Council. The participants of the 2006 conference supported the Council’s initiative to create a hydrophysical journal, which would discuss the scientific foundations and applied aspects of maritime activities in the North-West of the Russian Federation and in Russia as a whole.

The first issue of the journal (until 2010, a collection of scientific papers) was published in June 2008. This was preceded by a great deal of work on the creation of the Editorial Board, the formation of topics, the gathering of information on possible authors and relevant organizations. Natalia Evgenyevna Pokrovskaya (the Head of Editorial Staff), Natalia Alekseevna Serebryanskaya (Responsible Secretary), Nellie Kalinina (Editor) took an active part in this work. Together with the Chief Editor, they revived the journal. An important milestone in the history of the journal was its inclusion in the list of  Higher ‎Attestation Commission (HAC) of the Russian Federation in 2010. Due to the careful selection of manuscipts for publication, facilitated in to small part by the practice of double-blind review of the manuscript by two experts, the value of publications and the citation of the journal have grown over time. In 2013, along with the St.Petersburg Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Science, the Russian Academy of Sciences joined the founders of the journal, the journal became an academic one. In the following years the Editorial Board of the Journal worked on updating the topic, composition of the Editorial Board, base of reviewers, publication and popularization of the journal. As a result, the next milestone in the development of the journal was achieved: since 2017, it’s been indexed in the Scopus database.

Nowadays, the Deputy Chief Editor Vladimir Alekseevich Ryabchenko, Head Secretary Ekaterina Vladimirovna Sofina, Editor Asya Viktorovna Storozhevykh and editorial staff Natalia Vasilyevna Bashmakova make a big contribution to the development of the Journal.