European Digital Twin Ocean – EDITO ModelLab
The European Digital Twin Ocean platform makes knowledge, data and tools available to every citizen, researcher and policymaker to enable them to better use marine and coastal areas worldwide. Deltares participates in the efforts of building an interactive and dynamic digital representation of the ocean for better decision making and sustainable action through the EDITO-Model Lab project.
Vision
The European Commission announced its vision to build a European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO) at the One Ocean Summit in February 2022. Since then, EDITO became a flagship initiative of the European Union’s “Mission Restore our Oceans and Waters”.
The primary objective is to enable the creation of virtual representations of marine and coastal environments around the globe supported by European data, models and computing resources. EDITO enables policymakers and citizens alike to explore desirable futures and assess ocean management strategies, making ocean knowledge more accessible and impactful than ever before. At the same time EDITO also allows researchers, industry, businesses, and entrepreneurs to become partners in knowledge generation, and assemble their own twin applications, with the overarching goal of ensuring a safe, healthy, and productive ocean.
Underlying models for the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO) platform
The European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO) platform engine is being developed with European partners in the EDITO-Model Lab project, including Deltares. They are helping to develop a system in which the oceans, seas and coastal system are modelled and visualised. New techniques make a lot of data rapidly available, and EDITO makes this accessible.
With recent developments in Data Science and Software Engineering, there are many more opportunities to run numerical software online on cloud and high performance computing infrastructure provided by the European Union. For instance, EDITO offers users options to compute new scenarios without having to install or even download anything to do so. In addition, it integrates different software models on its platform, including Delft3D FM and D-Eco Impact, allowing for new combinations.
In addition, artificial intelligence enables much faster calculations. EDITO-Model Lab not only focuses on the next generation of physics based ocean and coastal models, but also on how to harness the possibilities that artificial intelligence can offer in this domain. The EDITO-Model Lab partnership includes institutes specialized on ocean artificial intelligence algorithms and relevant companies in the field, like Nvidia, in its Advisory Board.
EDITO simplifies and modernises how we build and run ocean computations. It lowers the barrier to entry: enabling ocean scientists to work with modern cloud-based technologies even if they are not well versed into ICT. If offers a modern and attractive design with intuitive navigation, simply powerful.
Lőrinc Mészáros, Deltares EDTIO-Model Lab project leader
Future
In 2023-2024, the focus was on building the underlying infrastructure and engine. Finally, 2025 revolves around the users. Both technical and non-technical users who want to work with the tools and data or want to make use of the insights will be introduced to the platform and learn how to use it for their purpose. A major event where researchers and policymakers will be introduced to the capabilities of EDITO is taking place in the European Digital Ocean Pavilion during the United Nations Ocean Conference in June 2025 in Nice.
Contact
Do you want to get started with data and tools offered by the Digital Twin Ocean or would you like to add data, tools or knowledge? Please contact us.
