Hydrography: Building Resilience through Digital Ocean Twins

Overview

The massive social, economic, and environmental transitions happening across the world raise the need for thinking of hydrography beyond maritime navigation and other maritime applications.

Digital Ocean Twins have the potential to play a critical role in optimizing and supporting sustainable ocean development, by providing data and knowledge for predicting climate change, monitoring marine resources, and exploring marine life.

Since most of the world’s population are dependent on oceans and other water bodies, a demand-oriented provision of hydrographic information is of fundamental importance to support informed decision-making by diverse stakeholders of ocean-related industries like fishing, shipping, offshore energy production, etc. Digital ocean twins through the integration of latest technologies and new data sources can aid in developing better understanding of the ocean's complex processes and their interactions with human activities, such as climate change, pollution, resource extraction, overfishing, etc., and provide accurate predictions of ocean conditions under expected interventions, thereby accelerating optimal decision-making, and effective interventions.