ESA with partners creates Earth’s digital twin

Destination Earth is a European Union initiative that aims to create a complete digital replica of our planet. This digital twin of the Earth will make it possible to visualise, monitor and predict both natural and human activities on the planet. The technology aims to improve our understanding and management of environmental change, support sustainable development and enhance responses to climate-related challenges.

The initiative aims to use the latest technological advances to manage natural resources more efficiently and to mitigate the negative impacts of human activities.

The programme will be implemented in stages. In June this year, the Destination Earth system, based on artificial intelligence algorithms, was officially launched at the LUMI supercomputer centre in Kajaani, Finland. The programme will be significantly expanded over the next five to six years. The current launch means that, for the time being, the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) and LUMI supercomputers will simulate the effects of climate change and extreme weather events.

Existing information systems already meet many of these needs and have reached a level of maturity comparable to publicly available operational monitoring and forecasting systems. However, DestinE aims to significantly improve these systems by applying advanced digital technologies in areas where faster progress in Earth ecosystem simulation is needed.

Several European organisations are responsible for developing the key elements of the initiative:

• European Space Agency (ESA): An international organisation dedicated to the exploration and use of space, ESA is responsible for the DestinE Open Core Service Platform, a user-friendly platform that will exploit the most comprehensive and sophisticated data from space observations, including ESA Earth Explorers satellites, the Copernicus Sentinel series, ECMWF data and, over time, other major European data resources.

• European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF): An international organisation specialising in weather forecasting. In particular, in 2006, ECMWF’s weather forecast accuracy surpassed that of other numerical models worldwide, outperforming the US GFS model by about one day. ECMWF is responsible for the digital twin engine, including the development of the first two digital twins: the Digital Twin on Weather-Induced and Geophysical Extremes and the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin.

The Digital Twin on Weather-Induced and Geophysical Extremes, managed by ECMWF, will provide capabilities and services for assessing and predicting environmental extremes. This will enable more accurate forecasting of the occurrence and impact of extreme natural events such as floods and forest fires.

The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin will support the generation of analytical insights and the testing of predictive scenarios to support adaptation and mitigation policies over decadal timescales at regional and national levels.

Over the coming years, more digital twins will be developed and connected to create a ‘complete’ digital replica of Earth’s systems by 2030. Potential new solutions could include digital twins of oceans, biodiversity and urban environments.

• The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) is an international organisation responsible for the establishment, maintenance and exploitation of European satellite meteorological observation systems. In the Destination Earth project, Eumetsat is tasked with the development of the Multi-Cloud Data Lake¹ that forms the basis of DestinE, including its design, construction and testing.

¹ The Multi-Cloud Data Lake provides nearly unlimited storage capacity and compute scalability, combining the power of analytics with the flexibility of big data models and the agility and limitless resources of the cloud. It radically simplifies the effort to derive insight and value from all this data, ultimately delivering faster business results.

As mentioned above, the DestinE programme will be developed in stages. Here are the stages planned by the European Space Agency (ESA):

• by 2024: Creation of an open digital platform and development of the first two digital twins: the Digital Twin on Weather-Induced and Geophysical Extremes and the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin
• by 2027: Integration of additional digital twins into the platform
• by 2030: Achieving a “complete” digital replica of the Earth by converging all available Digital Twins on the platform

These stages aim to progressively introduce advanced tools and technologies that will enable more accurate monitoring and analysis of climate change while supporting sustainable development.

Peter Bauer, who has played a key role in implementing the Scalability Programme to prepare forecasting systems for new technologies on supercomputers, will elaborate on the concept of the Earth’s digital twin in his presentation. He coordinated the European flagship project ExtremeEarth, which led to his appointment as Director of ECMWF’s Destination Earth programme.