OBSERVER: How Copernicus Marine supports the European Digital Twin of the Ocean

The European Green Deal, presented in December 2019, is a landmark set of policy initiatives by the European Commission to pursue climate neutrality by 2050. Restoring Europe’s seas and oceans, ensuring the sustainability of Europe’s blue economy sectors, as well as protecting ocean biodiversity and marine ecosystems, are outlined as priorities. 

In that context, and with the aim to leverage European research and innovation, blue investments, and citizen engagement to deliver tangible results, the European Union (EU) launched a mission to restore our ocean, seas and waters by 2030. A key element of this mission is the development of a new digital ocean knowledge system, known as the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO). 

The EU DTO was announced by President von der Leyen at the One Ocean Summit in Brest in February 2022. Underscoring Europe’s commitment, six European states signed the Brest Declaration during the One Ocean Summit, committing to transform Mercator Ocean International (MOi) into an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to ocean prediction and with the mission to help bring to life the vision of a digital ocean. This will ensure that the expertise acquired by MOi as the entrusted entity for the Copernicus Marine Service will be fully capitalised upon to ensure that the EU DTO is a success. 

A Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) empowers citizens to make informed decisions backed by science and data to protect marine environments through the creation of a digital copy of the ocean. See full video here.

Ocean systems and their dynamics are complex. Although marine science has made significant progress over the years, our understanding of marine ecosystem changes, sea level changes and other important ocean phenomena remains limited. However, as technology has continued to advance and improve, with data coming from a variety of sources such as from satellites, buoys, floats, and other platforms, so has our understanding of the ocean. Advanced cloud technology, computing power, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques have also expanded the set of tools available to underpin oceanographic research. New approaches have started to emerge, with digital twin technology at the forefront.

The Digital Twin Ocean replicates the properties and behaviours of marine systems integrating data from a wide range of sources and advanced models to enable better decision making

The EU DTO, at its core, is a digital space that provides access to vast amounts of data, advanced models, AI, and other tools, to allow the simulation of the properties and behaviours of marine systems, including marine life and impact of human activities. This is made possible thanks to the availability of real-time, high volume, heterogeneous ocean data, with long time series. In that perspective, the Copernicus Marine Service plays a key role in enabling the EU DTO by providing global and pan-European ocean observation data, forecasts, and analyses. 

The Copernicus Marine Service develops and uses numerical models of the global ocean and European seas, which use satellite and in situ data as inputs. These models take into account interactions of the ocean with sea ice, the atmosphere, or the marine biogeochemistry, and when combined with available data from the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), pan-European and national research infrastructures, and socio-economic data, will enable the DTO to provide continuous, timely, end-to-end marine monitoring. By doing so, the EU DTO will provide the widest possible range of open ocean observation datasets and data products.

The European DTO will leverage existing European science and assets, integrating capabilities from existing ocean observing, monitoring, prediction data programmes and services, including the Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet into a single digital framework. European science and assets.

The combination and integration of data from the Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet into a single digital framework requires the development of a new public, digital infrastructure backbone. The EU Public Infrastructure for the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO-Infra) project was launched by the European Commission to support the development of this core infrastructure. MOi and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), the two main operators of the Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet respectively, were mandated to lead the project. EDITO-Infra will provide the foundation for the further development of the EU DTO by hosting the deployment of DTO applications in ongoing and future projects. In addition, it will support the deployment of new generation of ocean models and tools. The Copernicus Marine Service plays an important role in EDITO-Infra, as a source of data that feeds the data lake in the core infrastructure. EDITO-Infra will upgrade, combine, and integrate key service components of the Copernicus Marine Service into a single digital framework that includes a wide range of existing and new data sources, and computing tools. 

In addition to the core infrastructure, a new generation of ocean numerical models needs to be developed and integrated into the EU DTO. The EU Virtual Ocean Model Lab for the European Digital Twin ocean (EDITO-ModelLab) is the sister project of EDITO-Infra and is led by MOi. EDITO-Model Lab will leverage data from EMODnet, EuroGOOS, ECMWF, Copernicus Services and Sentinel satellite observations, as well as high-performance, distributed computing facilities to develop the models.

EDITO-ModelLab aims to deliver a Virtual Ocean Model Lab, where users gain access to specialised tools in a digital environment. The standard core model suite incorporates modelling and simulation software, AI algorithms, and other accessibility and analytical tools, to deliver a virtual lab where users can explore ‘focused applications’ that refer to the Horizon Europe ‘Mission Lighthouses’ projects and the sustainable Blue economy, and simulations of ‘what-if’ scenarios to find solutions to natural and man-induced hazards. The Copernicus Marine Service supports the EDITO-ModelLab by providing existing capabilities upon which new generations of models can be built and integrated into the engine of the EU DTO. It will serve as both an input and validation for new generation models, and will continue to support the provision of freely available ocean knowledge to researchers, decision makers, and public users. Both EDITO-Infra and EDITO-Model Lab are key interconnected projects supporting the development of the EU DTO.

Once operational, the EU DTO will provide a coherent, multi-variable and multi-dimensional description of the marine environment and biodiversity, allowing a digital exploration of the ocean in time and space, based on different ‘what-if’ scenarios. The EU DTO is a landmark project which is expected to revolutionise current ocean science, improve ocean knowledge and accessibility to ocean data, provide more accurate simulations, ‘what-if’ scenario capabilities and decision-making tools, and build on all existing EU assets.

Scientists, users, and ocean communities are working together to co-design and co-create the EU DTO, to ensure that it best serves the wider community. On 15 June at the Digital Ocean Forum 2023, various EU DTO stakeholders, partners, and policy makers will engage in forward looking discussions on progress so far, the potential evolution and impact of the EU DTO.