Toward a digital twin of the coastal sea: Progress in the Wadden Sea

Talk
In session Digital Twins , Sept. 4, 2025, 10:45 – 11:45
Exact timing: 11:15 – 11:30
Room info: Lecture Hall

Lepper, Robert¹ , Reinert, M.¹

Digital twins of the ocean (DTO) make marine data available to support the development of the blue economy and enable a direct interaction through bi-directional components. Typical DTOs provide insufficient detail near the coast, because their resolution is too coarse and the underlying models lack processes that become relevant in shallow areas, e.g., at wetting and drying of tidal flats. As roughly 2.13 Billion of the world’s population live near a coast, downscaling ocean information to a local scale becomes necessary, as many practical applications, e.g., sediment management, require high resolution data. For this reason, we focused on the appropriate downscaling of regional and global data from existing DTOs using a high-resolution (100s of meters), unstructured, three-dimensional, process-based hindcast model in combination with in-situ observations. This high-resolution model allows the fine tidal channels, estuaries, and coastal structures like dams and flood barriers to be represented digitally. Our digital twin includes tidal dynamics, salinity, sea water temperature, waves, and suspended sediment transport. Thanks to a fast and intuitive web interface of our prototype digital twin, the model data provided enable a wide range of coastal applications and support sustainable management. Bi-directional web processing services (WPS) were implemented within the interactive web-viewer and include ecological habitat calculator, sediment management, cable route planning and marine renewable energy. Our next steps focus on extending the digital twin closer to being operational and on exploring the ability to predict the short-term future system behavior.