• June 28, 2022, 11:15 – 12:45

All material

Towards Digital Twins and other Lighthouse Projects

June 28, 2022

The ocean economy is growing and the pressures on our seas and the ocean, including from over exploitation, pollution and climate change, have asserted significant stresses on the marine system. Digital twins are rich, virtual representations of objects and systems, in this case the ocean system, or a part of it. They allow us to track how and why the things we care about are changing and simulate what their futures could be, including by exploring ‘what if?’ scenarios. They can provide critical knowledge to plan and guide human activities in the ocean and coastal spaces to safeguard a healthy ocean and support a sustainable green-blue economy.

Digital twins depend upon: an int egrated, and sustainable, ocean observing system ; well -managed, accessible and interoperable data and software; predictive processes or data-driven models with which users can interact, to support their needs; sharing of good and best practive and traing, education and outreach.


The connection between a digital twin and its real-world counterpart requires a well-formulated interface between the digital twin, environmental and societal data, and the user. User interaction is an essential function embedded in the design of digital twins, to ensure maximum information value for investment in ocean …


Digital hydromorphological twin of the Trilateral Wadden Sea

The project “Digital hydromorphological twin of the Trilateral Wadden Sea” focuses
on cooperation of cross-border data innovations between The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark,
the provision / harmonization of data together with a new digital geodata and
analysis infrastructure for the trilateral Wadden Sea World Heritage Site These
data and information are linked via Web portals and services to form a
versatile assistance system.

Different demands, requirements and restrictive environ­mental legislation pose major
challenges for the planning and maintenance of transport infra­structure in the
marine environment. TrilaWatt aims at developing and implementing a powerful
spatial data and analysis infra­structure on a homogenized database comprising
the Trilateral Wadden Sea area of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

High-resolution hydrographic data series are locally available for the German Bight.
These can be combined into spatial models. Due to the high mapping effort, area-wide
morphological and especially sedimentological surveys can only be conducted at
intervals of several years or decades. On the other hand, current issues
require much higher temporal resolution for the analysis and assessment of
environmental impacts in the entire Wadden Sea. Pressures are addressed in the
MSFD Annex III among others as descriptors "seabed …

Today's Earth-System Models (ESM) are not designed to be interactive. They follow a configure, setup, run, and data analysis scheme. Thus, researchers often have to wait for hours or days until they can inspect model runtime diagnostic data. This causes time-consuming round trips between setup and analysis and limits interaction and insights into an ESM at runtime.

We aim to overcome this static scientific modeling process with interactive exploration of ESMs. It will allow to monitor the state of the simulation via dashboards presenting real-time diagnostics within a digital twin world. It will support to halt simulations, move back in time, and explore divergent setup at any given point in the simulation. Therefore, we have to include code in ESMs to access, store, and change data in every part, and make it available to interactive visualization dashboards.

In today's monolithic implementation of ESMs and and other scientific models, we have to modularize models and discover or recover interfaces between these modules. The modularization does not only help with restructuring existing ESMs, it also allows to integrate additional scientific domains into the interactive simulation environment.

We apply a domain-driven modularization approach utilizing reverse engineering techniques combining static and dynamic analysis of …

The Digital Earth Viewer is a visualisation platform capable of ingesting data from heterogeneous sources and performing spatial and temporal contextualisation upon them. Its web-based nature enables several users to access and visualise large geo-scientific datasets. Here we present the latest development of this viewer: collaborative capabilities that allow parallel, live exploration and annotation of 4 dimensional environments by multiple remote users.

A comprehensive study of the Earth System and its different environments requires understanding of multi-dimensional data acquired with a multitude of different sensors or produced by various complex models. Geoscientists use state of the art instruments and tecniques  to aquire and analise said data, which is in stark contrast with the outdated means that are often selected to present the resulting findings: today's most popular presentation software chocies (PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.) were developed to support a presentation style that has seen slim to none development over the last 70 years. Here I present a software framework for creating dynamic data presentations. This combination of different web based resources enables a new paradigm in data visualisation for scientific presentations.

The ocean economy is growing and the pressures on our seas and the ocean, including from over exploitation, pollution and climate change, have asserted significant stresses on the marine system. Digital twins are rich, virtual representations of objects and systems, in this case the ocean system, or a part of it. They allow us to track how and why the things we care about are changing and simulate what their futures could be, including by exploring ‘what if?’ scenarios. They can provide critical knowledge to plan and guide human activities in the ocean and coastal spaces to safeguard a healthy ocean and support a sustainable green-blue economy.

Digital twins depend upon: an int egrated, and sustainable, ocean observing system ; well -managed, accessible and interoperable data and software; predictive processes or data-driven models with which users can interact, to support their needs; sharing of good and best practive and traing, education and outreach.


The connection between a digital twin and its real-world counterpart requires a well-formulated interface between the digital twin, environmental and societal data, and the user. User interaction is an essential function embedded in the design of digital twins, to ensure maximum information value for investment in ocean …


Digital hydromorphological twin of the Trilateral Wadden Sea

The project “Digital hydromorphological twin of the Trilateral Wadden Sea” focuses
on cooperation of cross-border data innovations between The Netherlands, Germany and Denmark,
the provision / harmonization of data together with a new digital geodata and
analysis infrastructure for the trilateral Wadden Sea World Heritage Site These
data and information are linked via Web portals and services to form a
versatile assistance system.

Different demands, requirements and restrictive environ­mental legislation pose major
challenges for the planning and maintenance of transport infra­structure in the
marine environment. TrilaWatt aims at developing and implementing a powerful
spatial data and analysis infra­structure on a homogenized database comprising
the Trilateral Wadden Sea area of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

High-resolution hydrographic data series are locally available for the German Bight.
These can be combined into spatial models. Due to the high mapping effort, area-wide
morphological and especially sedimentological surveys can only be conducted at
intervals of several years or decades. On the other hand, current issues
require much higher temporal resolution for the analysis and assessment of
environmental impacts in the entire Wadden Sea. Pressures are addressed in the
MSFD Annex III among others as descriptors "seabed …

Today's Earth-System Models (ESM) are not designed to be interactive. They follow a configure, setup, run, and data analysis scheme. Thus, researchers often have to wait for hours or days until they can inspect model runtime diagnostic data. This causes time-consuming round trips between setup and analysis and limits interaction and insights into an ESM at runtime.

We aim to overcome this static scientific modeling process with interactive exploration of ESMs. It will allow to monitor the state of the simulation via dashboards presenting real-time diagnostics within a digital twin world. It will support to halt simulations, move back in time, and explore divergent setup at any given point in the simulation. Therefore, we have to include code in ESMs to access, store, and change data in every part, and make it available to interactive visualization dashboards.

In today's monolithic implementation of ESMs and and other scientific models, we have to modularize models and discover or recover interfaces between these modules. The modularization does not only help with restructuring existing ESMs, it also allows to integrate additional scientific domains into the interactive simulation environment.

We apply a domain-driven modularization approach utilizing reverse engineering techniques combining static and dynamic analysis of …

The Digital Earth Viewer is a visualisation platform capable of ingesting data from heterogeneous sources and performing spatial and temporal contextualisation upon them. Its web-based nature enables several users to access and visualise large geo-scientific datasets. Here we present the latest development of this viewer: collaborative capabilities that allow parallel, live exploration and annotation of 4 dimensional environments by multiple remote users.

A comprehensive study of the Earth System and its different environments requires understanding of multi-dimensional data acquired with a multitude of different sensors or produced by various complex models. Geoscientists use state of the art instruments and tecniques  to aquire and analise said data, which is in stark contrast with the outdated means that are often selected to present the resulting findings: today's most popular presentation software chocies (PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.) were developed to support a presentation style that has seen slim to none development over the last 70 years. Here I present a software framework for creating dynamic data presentations. This combination of different web based resources enables a new paradigm in data visualisation for scientific presentations.