Digital Twins of the Ocean – Opportunities to Inform Sustainable Ocean Governance

Recent advances in High Performance Computing and Earth System Model resolution have enabled the Earth Science community to envision Digital Twins as an innovative approach to global environmental problems. This is also true of the Ocean Science community.

A Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) merges marine system models with observational data and machine learning analytics to produce a digital replica of the real ocean. In addition to natural phenomena, DTOs can include socio-economic factors (e.g. ocean-use, pollution). Thus, DTOs can be used to monitor the current ocean state, but also to simulate future ‘what-if’ scenarios for varying human interventions. Another benefit of DTOs is that they can be used by a variety of stakeholders: by scientists to understand the ocean, by policymakers to make well-informed decisions, and by citizens to improve ocean literacy. As such, DTOs are a powerful tool in future-proofing sustainable development. Moreover, they provide strong motivation to improve the marine data landscape and build an interoperable system with agreed upon formats and standards. DTOs are tailored to a specific ocean area or purpose, such that a DTO framework is needed to implement data connectivity and interoperability, ease of access, standards and to highlight gaps. The UN Ocean Decade Program DITTO aims to provide such a framework.  Specifically, DITTO advances worldwide collaboration between scientists, data and IT experts to develop a common understanding of DTOs, to establish best practices in their development, and to advance a digital framework for DTOs to empower ocean professionals from all sectors around the world to effectively create their own digital twins.

DTOs offer the technology for building a social-ecologically integrated ocean ecosystem with observation- and modelling networks that support sustainable ocean governance.