#09 What are Digital Twins for the Ocean and why do we need them?
This episode covers a very exciting topic—digital twins. Digital twins have existed for a while in other industries, for example for automotive design. A digital twin basically allows designers, researchers, engineers to test-case changes to a design, use cases and scenarios affecting whatever the digital twin represents.
When it comes to oceans, digital twins could be huge contributors and facilitators of a sustainable development as well as ocean protection. I am welcoming Ute Brönner and Martin Visbeck, co-leaders of the UN Ocean Decade Programme DITTO, Digital Twins of the Ocean. Ute Brönner is a senior project manager at Sintef Ocean, a research institute in Norway, and Martin leads the Physical Oceanography department at the GEOMAR Institute for ocean research in Kiel, Germany. While their respective work and academic background is not necessarily the same, they have come together in the last years to advocate for an international, standardized and organised approach to designing digital twins of the ocean.
In the episode we discuss exactly how their idea came to life, what their common work entails and most importantly what digital twins will be able to do as well as current barriers to their creation. Digital twins really cover all aspects of ocean professions, from observations using robotics, scientific data analysis, high computational modelling and social sciencees.
Digital twins can support risk assessment, consisting of data collection and modeling, allowing to extrapolate predictions for the future. In the future, digital twins could do this in real time, allowing adaptive predictions, hind-cast and long time-series modeling. In addition with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, digital twins will likely be the tool for fusing any ocean data for smart decision making in the future. Hence, they could be a massively effective tool to help governments make smart decisions to mitigate worst effects of the climate crisis, allow us to look into a possible future before implementing actual technologies or inventions in marine and coastal areas and test hypotheses.
Of course, we will not have one large digital twin for the entire ocean. Instead, a future will rather offer several, many, digital twins for different coastal, regional, or global aspects of the ocean, even breaking down into different specialties. For example, a digital twin might be specifically designed for testing coastal sea level rise strategy assessments, and another might be modeling the impacts of a certain carbon dioxide removal method. Moreover, it will be even absolutely essential to have many digital twins on similar processes and regions in order to grow confidence. As a decision maker, you will be able to assess a risk by looking at the forecast of these digital twins: if they all give similar outlooks, the prediction seems to be good—if, on the other hand, all digital twins give a range of varying results, it seems the risk cannot be quantified or predicted that accurately, or at least not at high confidence.
To learn more about this global effort, listen to the episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts (Opens in a new window) and check out the DITTO website (Opens in a new window).
