The European Digital Twin Ocean is a virtual replica of the ocean that makes ocean knowledge readily available to everyone. It integrates data from many different sources, including satellites, sensors, computer models and even personal devices like smartphone apps. These different data sources constantly “feed” the Digital Twin to provide continuous and up-to-date information about the ocean: from the behaviour of marine species to weather patterns, chemical processes, economic activities and much more.

The European Digital Twin Ocean provides both historical and near real-time information about the ocean’s real-world conditions and processes. This information can then be used to simulate real-world scenarios and predict the outcomes of different scenarios. 

To take just one example, scientists can use applications that are currently running on the European Digital Twin Ocean to simulate how seagrass meadows can protect against coastal hazards like flooding and erosion. By comparing these scenarios, users such as data scientists, decision-makers, local policy implementers and the wider public can understand the impact of seagrass on coastal ecosystems with an unparalleled level of detail and accuracy.

The European Digital Twin Ocean can help us answer questions around what’s happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen next with an unparalleled level of detail and accuracy. It fuels knowledge, decision-making and action for a sustainable Ocean.

EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It offers tools to those building digital twins to co-create the European Digital Twin Ocean, support science-based decision making, and ensure maximum impact for marine research & innovation actions across the key objectives of the EU Mission Ocean & Waters.

The development of the EDITO platform began under the framework of the “EU Public Infrastructure for the European Digital Twin Ocean” (EDITO-Infra) project, which ran from October 2022 to February 2025. This initiative continues with the “EDITO 2” project, currently running from March 2025-August 2028. Beyond the lifetime of these initial projects, EDITO is intended to evolve into a long-term public European infrastructure that extends beyond the lifetime of these projects. Its development is led by Mercator Ocean International (MOi) and VLIZ, on behalf of Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet, respectively, currently with the support of Seascape Belgium as mandated organisation to administer the EMODnet Secretariat. By 2030, EDITO envisions a fully operational European Digital Twin Ocean platform, serving as a global benchmark for digital ocean solutions and democratised access to ocean knowledge.

EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It services and supports the ecosystem of research and innovation activities, projects, and initiatives, that are working to develop science-based, digital ocean models, twins and applications, connecting and making them interoperable towards co-creating the European Digital Twin Ocean.

Co-Creating the European Digital Twin Ocean

In Phase 1, EDITO-Infra began work on the underpinning infrastructure of the European Digital Twin Ocean. The project validated the potential of the European Digital Twin Ocean by upgrading, combining, and integrating key service components of existing EU ocean observing, monitoring and data programs, namely Copernicus Marine Service and the European Marine Observation & Data Network (EMODnet), into a single digital framework. 

Building on this foundation, and ensuring balanced representation of key European Commission Services underpinning EDITO developments (i.e., Copernicus Marine and EMODnet), Phase 2 will scale up EDITO’s capabilities, expand the platform’s reach, ensuring accessibility for non-experts while enhancing its services for researchers and institutional contributors, and grow the community of projects and initiatives harnessing EDITO to co-create the European Digital Twin Ocean. 

Building the Community

In Phase 1, key members of the oceanographic community (i.e., related to EMODnet and Copernicus Marine services), and targeted Horizon Europe research & innovation projects (i.e., EDITO Model Lab) were engaged to co-design the EDITO platform. Early access was provided to a larger panel of users following specific calls for access, as beta-testers (e.g., DTO-BioFlow, Blue-Cloud, ILIAD, amongst many others).

EDITO now continues building the European Digital Twin Ocean platform and community in its second phase, which will run from 2025-2028. In this period, the EDITO infrastructure will be strengthened, making it more powerful while simplifying its user interfaces. This will ease access to resources, allowing developers to build on the platform more easily and enabling users to interact with it in an intuitive way; for example, through the development of a smart viewer offering multiple functionalities. The processes for data onboarding and validation will also be enhanced, expanding the EDITO data lake to include not only physical ocean data but also biogeochemical, socio-economic, and citizen science information.  

The EDITO modelling environment will be enriched with new tools to support the easy development of Focus Applications (FAs) and What-if Scenarios (WiS). FAs target intermediate users such as modellers, programmers, data scientists and other researchers, who will use the technology behind EDITO to develop new applications and expand the platform’s capabilities. WiS target end users such as policy makers and implementors, blue economy actors, applied researchers and innovators, activists and the general public, who will use simulation and data visualisation tools for their real-world practical information needs.  

Contributions from the scientific community will be fostered through open calls, enabling the creation of applications addressing diverse themes towards further evolving the European Digital Twin Ocean. The co-construction process initiated at the outset of EDITO will be thus strengthened, while the establishment of an enhanced user support centre will ensure that all users can more effectively exploit the platform’s potential and receive the assistance that they need to benefit fully from EDITO’s capabilities.

EDITO is a data lake (a high-speed central storage) of all EMODnet and Copernicus Marine products. Building on existing European assets, the public infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean upgrades, combines and integrates data and services from EMODnet and the Copernicus Marine Service into a single digital framework. By building on these established European infrastructures, EDITO harmonizes high-resolution ocean observation data, forecasts, and analysis.

Located beside the data are virtual machines that run e.g., Jupyter notebooks, Python, etc. The concept is that, if you want to process Big Data, then you bring your code to EDITO rather than download the data sets. When you access datalab.dive.edito.eu you are running your code on virtual machines beside the data. You are still free to download data from the existing EMODnet and Copernicus Marine Portals to work on locally. EDITO is a complementary service focused on providing Cloud Computing services and the data products on the respective portals are identical to what is available through EDITO.

The EDITO service offer is geared at enabling the marine community to contribute to the co-creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean, while sparking an innovative knowledge ecosystem that evolves and scales up to expand its reach beyond expert users, to cater to non-expert users. The ambition behind the offer is to deliver on the promise of servicing decision makers across the public and private sector, civil society, and ultimately citizens.

• Watch the video

The EDITO Community welcomes European, regional, national and local Research & Innovation projects and digital twinning initiatives to co-create the European Digital Twin Ocean.

Register to EDITO to start using the platform.

At the Digital Ocean Forum 2025, the launch of the EDITO Project Forum was announced. The Forum will be an inclusive, collaborative space established to connect and support all European, national, and local projects who are contributing to the co-creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean. More details coming in early 2026! Learn more.

EDITO’S first Call for funding will offer financial support to onboard existing applications onto the EDITO platform. Join our information session on Januaty 19, 2026 to learn more. Learn more.

Subscribe to the EDITO Newsletter

EDITO is first and foremost an infrastructure catering to anyone who is building an Ocean related digital twin, enabling them to carry out their work and share their own developments. If you are building a digital twin, it gears you up with high quality marine data, tools, and computing power to ease this process.

Yes, a user can do both! Users can upload their own models and data. They can also collaborate with other users by sharing data, process and knowledge. A free tier -including processing and data storage- is provided per user and project.

It solely depends on the access policy established for such data and/or models by the user who has uploaded them. Users have privacy management capabilities for their resources. Thereby, privacy is handled for every EDITO resource (i.e. data, processing and services).

The EDITO platform offers many built-in tools, including popular data science and ocean-oriented tools (e.g., viewer, library, packages). The offer goes well beyond that of a data viewer/renderer, to also include computation and automation. In addition, you can add new tools to your private space, if your favorite ones are not yet available. Register and Subscribe.