ILIAD SUPPLEMENTARY – Dissemination and outreach to stakeholders with focus on Norwegian SFI, NCE and their industry partners

The ILIAD project will develop the technological basis for Digital Twins of the Ocean. These digital twins will be the virtual representations the ocean based on data from observations (satellite data and sensors in the ocean), modelling (ocean, ecosystem, and climate models) and digital infrastructures (high performance computing clusters and cloud data storage). These twins will show the state of the ocean in real-time, but they can also be used to study 'what-if' scenarios. A what-if scenario could be used to decide the best location for human activities at sea, to test the impact of changes in marine operations or to prepare for the impacts of extreme weather before it happens. Norway is an ocean nation with many human activities offshore, on the continental shelf, and in coastal areas. New developments for offshore industries, like offshore aquaculture and wind, will need new tools for planning these activities and for understanding how these affect the environment and interact with each other. A digital twin will contain all the data that has been gathered in the past and real-time measurements in an area of the ocean. This will allow neighbouring activities to collaborate better in 'their' ocean area, share data and optimize. In Norway, we will demonstrate the ILIAD developments with Digital Twins for the Fjord Lab area, that is the Norwegian Sea from the Trondheim fjord to Ålesund, with twins for the SINTEF/NTNU OceanLab infrastructure in the fjord and applications for water quality monitoring and aquaculture. We will also collaborate with the Norwegian Research Centre on Wind Energy to combine the Digital Twin of a wind turbine with the Digital Twin of the Ocean surrounding that wind turbine. ILIAD is a consortium with 56 partners across Europe; our Norwegian partners include SINTEF Ocean, SINTEF Digital, HUB Ocean, NTNU and Bente Lilja Bye.

The Horizon Europe Green Deal project ILIAD will commercialize an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO), integrating all existing EU Earth Observing, Modelling Digital Infrastructures and Facilities. The ILIAD consortium with 56 partners will combine high-resolution modelling with real-time sensing of ocean parameters, advanced algorithms for forecasting of spatio-temporal events and pattern recognition. The DTO will consist of several real-time to near-real-time digital replicas of the ocean. ILIAD will assemble a broad and diverse user community of existing and new users, who will use the project's innovative technological solutions to address their challenges. Furthermore, ILIAD will create a marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesized information and value-adding services in combination with the ILIAD DTO. The 5 Norwegian partners in the consortium have strong roles and contributions in the funded project. However, due to the quality and complexity of the consortium and the project itself, Norwegian research and industry will benefit from an extension for additional, independent, and targeted dissemination. ILIAD SUPPLEMENTARY is intended to increase the societal impact of the partners’ participation in the Horizon Europe Green Deal project to implement the Digital Twin of the Ocean by organizing outreach and engaging information events also for Norwegian municipalities and other public bodies, businesses, special interest organizations and researchers across Norway, including research areas (Bergen and Tromsø) or research infrastructure (LoVe) not represented in the project