Towards a regional Digital Twin of the Balearic Sea for sustainable ocean management

The Balearic Islands, a biodiversity hotspot facing growing pressure from climate change and human activities, are a key area for developing and implementing effective management strategies for marine ecosystems. This is especially crucial in light of the European Union’s goal to protect 30% of its seas by 2030, with particular emphasis on areas like the Cabrera Archipelago Maritime-Terrestrial National Park, a major Mediterranean protected area. 

To help achieve this goal, the Balearic Islands Coastal Observing and Forecasting System (SOCIB) has developed a suite of user-oriented tools in the Mediterranean Sea that translate scientific knowledge into accessible information for stakeholders. These tools, built upon open access data provided by regional research infrastructures and available in the European marine data portals (e.g. Copernicus Marine Service, EMODNet), integrate historical and near real-time data from multi-platform observations (e.g. satellites, buoys, profiling floats and gliders) with regional ocean models. This allows for continuous and timely monitoring of essential ocean variables (e.g. temperature, salinity, chlorophyll-a concentration, sea level, currents, winds) as well as key derived indicators (e.g. anomalies, gradients, ocean heat content, mixed layer properties, transports). This information is provided for all sub-regions of the Mediterranean Sea, enabling comprehensive assessment of ocean state, variability, and change across various spatial and temporal scales, from open to coastal and near-shore ocean waters, and from the surface to deep waters. Specifically, these tools enable detecting extreme ocean events (such as marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, sea level maxima or storms) in real-time and provide 10-day forecasts as well as estimating long-term variations in response to climate change, from local to regional scales. By facilitating the access and visualization to relevant information for users, these applications support evidence-based decision-making for climate change adaptation. 

The increasing capability of the ocean observing and forecasting systems integrated into science-based tools are an important step towards improving the capabilities and the development of regional Digital Twins of the Ocean, allowing more effective management and conservation of valuable marine ecosystems and supporting the European's ambitious marine protection targets.