Digital Twins of the Ocean can foster a sustainable blue economy in a protected marine environment

Abstract

While the field of hydrography is crucial for maritime navigation and other maritime applications, oceanography is the field that provides the relevant data and knowledge for predicting climate change, monitoring marine resources, and exploring marine life. Digital ocean twins combine these two exciting fields and combine ocean observations and ocean models to establish virtual representations of a real world system, in this case the ocean or an ocean area, as well as assets in the ocean and processes within ocean industries or the natural environment. They have the potential to play a critical role in optimising and supporting sustainable ocean development. Digital Twins are synchronised with their real-world counterparts at a specific frequency and fidelity. They can provide valuable insights into the ocean's state and its evolution over time, which can be used to support decision-making in ocean governance and various ocean-related industries. Digital ocean twins can transform human ocean interactions by accelerating holistic understanding, optimal decision-making, and effective interventions. Digital twins of the ocean use ocean observations, historical and forecast data to represent the past and present and simulate possible future scenarios. They are motivated by outcomes, tailored to use cases, powered by integration, built on data, guided by domain knowledge, and implemented in IT systems. In this article, we explore the benefits of digital twins for the ocean, the challenges in developing them, and the current state of the art in ocean digital twin technology. One of the main benefits of digital ocean twins is their ability to provide accurate predictions of ocean conditions under expected interventions. Their information can be used to support decision- making in various applications including ocean-related industries, such as fishing, shipping, and offshore energy production. Additionally, digital twins can help to improve our understanding of the ocean's complex processes and their interactions with human activities, such as climate change, pollution, resource extraction and overfishing. Researchers and IT companies are combining various technologies and data sources, such as the Internet of Things for ocean observations, state of the art data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data spaces and vocabularies into digital ocean twins to contextualise data, improve the accuracy of ocean models and make ocean knowledge more accessible to a wide range of users.