DARTHs (Digital eARth Twin Hydrology systems)

There is a great hype about Digital Earth Twins (DETs) and EU, ESA, NASA and other institutions issue calls for building such IT infrastructures (ITI). This paper face the topic from a point of view of hydrologists who are concerned with the science content of these ITI. The Authors see in DETs an opportunity to make easier the work of scientists and professionals. However they claim that some aspect of making science should be respected. Mainly they are the hypothesis testing and estimation of errors in hindcasting or forecasting. Beside, the Authors claim that building a DET for Hydrology (called DARTH) is an enterprise that implies some choices about the implementation of models and of the infrastructure. DARTHs are not in fact just "models" and have requirements that need to be satisfied. Finally the Authors support the opinion of an open science oriented implementation of these ITI that also allows the participatory action of all the scientists that like to contribute (and look with suspect to science processing where just a few contribute to the core science). In turn also this options has requirements that should be reflected in the implementation.
To sum up, the Authors think that this is the right moment to push these ideas and desire to open a discussion with other colleagues. 

Final published paper: 

• https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/26/4773/2022/

You can find the manuscript submitted to HESS discussions HESSD at the moment in our OSF repository, here.  

UPDATE: The paper had a positive first round of reviews that you can see here.  Below, please find the revised text with the supplemental material. 

• Revised DARTHs Manuscript
• Supplemental Material

Final published paper: 

• https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/26/4773/2022/