Promoting Digital Twins of the Baltic Sea

Digital Twins are a powerful concept - initially intended to support complex technical products over their whole lifecycle, including ramp-up, operation and decommissioning. In recent years this concept has also become more and more popular in the maritime domain. Digital Twins are not only used to accompany maritime assets such as offshore wind plants or port facilities but can also be used to support decision making in marine spatial planning, maintaining marine ecosystems, dealing with marine hazards, or realize potentials of the oceans to mitigate climate change. Based on some general remarks on Digital Twins and some considerations on the Baltic Sea, this paper gives an introduction into the concept of Digital Twins of the Oceans. Based on this foundation, various technology examples are presented to illustrate the contribution of visual and analytic computing to offer powerful Digital Twins. Finally, ties are established to deal with this topic in STEM education.