The European Union (EU) has granted the Iliad consortium €17m to develop and launch a digital twin of the ocean that will provide accurate predictions of future developments in global seas.

The Iliad project, which is comprised of 56 partners from 18 countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, has been awarded the funding as part of the EU’s €1bn European Green Deal.

Iliad will develop virtual models designed to reflect accurately changes and processes accruing at the ocean. It will commercialise an interoperable, data-intensive and cost-effective model, capitalising on the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, modern computing infrastructure including IoT, social networking, big data and cloud computing

Iliad, which has received funding through the EU Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme, will combine high-resolution modelling with real-time sensing of ocean parameters, algorithms for forecasting of spatio-temporal events and pattern recognition. The virtual representations will consist of several real-time to near-real-time digital replicas of the ocean.

Iliad will also create a marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesised information and value-added services in combination with the project.

Project partners include industrial companies, end users, academic institutions, research and technology developers, and private firms.

“The development of innovative methods in open frameworks and platforms is needed to enable meaningful and informative model evaluations and comparisons for many large Earth science applications from weather to climate,” said Bente Lilja Bye, innovation manager of Iliad. “The ambitious Iliad project aims to build on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy to contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy.”

Georgios Sylaios from the Democritus University of Thrace, who is research and technology development manager of Iliad, added: “Our aim is to assemble as broad and diverse as possible user community of existing and new users, who will use the project’s innovative technology to address future challenges. By combining a large amount of diverse data in a semantically rich, and a data agnostic approach that allows simultaneous communication with real-world systems and models, we will enable researchers to develop what-if scenarios and analyse the impact of measures to prevent and adapt to climate change.”