News
Destination Earth Digital Twins of the Earth
DHMZ, 10 September 2024 - Experts from European meteorological and hydrological services, as well as scientific institutions, 70 participants onsite, along with 40 participants joining online, will discuss the further development and operational application of the on-demand regional component of the Weather-induced extremes Digital Twin, developed in the Destination Earth initiative of the European Commission which aims at simulating extreme weather events and their impacts on society and the economy (DestinE Extremes DT) from September 10 to 12, 2024, in Zagreb.
Destination Earth aims at building a novel information system to help respond and adapt to environmental challenges in support of the green and digital transition of the European Commission. DestinE's goal is to develop a highly accurate and interactive virtual replica of Earth by 2030 that will revolutionize how we monitor, model, and simulate the interactions between natural phenomena and human activities, and help answer questions such as: What will heatwaves look like in a world that is 2°C or 4°C warmer? How can we adapt our cities to protect human safety and health? It is implemented by ECMWF, EUMETSAT and ESA, under the leadership of DG CNECT of the European Commission. ECMWF together with partners in about 100 institutions across Europe are developing the first two high-priority digital twins which are the heart of the DestinE system.
The Extremes DT is an advanced information system that utilizes the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, provided by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC). It incorporates the latest advancements in weather forecasting models and cutting-edge technologies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. This system will enable more efficient prediction of extreme meteorological and hydrological events, as well as hazardous situations like air pollution. It will also provide unprecedentedly detailed and precise information about extreme events several days in advance, helping to assess their impact on the most vulnerable sectors and areas. This will significantly enhance risk management and the protection of citizens and infrastructure. The Extremes DT has two components, the global component developed by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts based on its Integrated Forecasting System.
The regional component is developed through a partnership between European hydrometeorological services and the scientific community under the leadership of ECMWF and Météo France. It features innovative functionality for on-demand activation, for instance during weather-induced extreme events that significantly impact society and the economy. It allows to simulate extreme events occurring over Europe and provide short-term weather forecasts with a horizontal resolution between 200 and 750 meters. This regional component of the Extremes DT for monitoring and forecasting weather extremes will utilize data from the global component developed by ECMWF. The regional component of the Extremes DT is being developed to enable rapid response to challenges such as storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, and air pollution.
During the three-day meeting in Zagreb, the project team will discuss how to advance the workflow and information flow, as well as the criteria for the activation of the system. They will also review plans for improving the high-resolution models underpinning the Extremes DT to further evolve the on-demand system, discuss strategies for integrating with combined models for sea state and flood forecasting, as well as address specific user needs in energy and other economic sectors.
DestinE’s Digital Twins, which ECMWF and its many partners are responsible for delivering, represent a unique infrastructure allowing to perform bespoke cutting-edge Earth system simulations to understand how the earth and its components will evolve under different scenarios. They build on the power of European national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) and the best centres for climate science in Europe and on the extraordinary supercomputing facilities of EuroHPC. DestinE’s Digital Twins will greatly complement the existing capabilities provided by national or European initiatives such as, for example, the NMHS or EU’s Copernicus services. They will empower NMHS and other decision makers to better respond and adapt to the pressing challenges of climate change and extreme events, said Irina Sandu, Director for Destination Earth at ECMWF.
DHMZ is one of ECMWF’s and Météo France’s partners within the regional component of the Extremes DT, as well as a member of ACCORD consortium that brings together 26 national meteorological services working collaboratively to enhance high-resolution numerical weather forecasting over limited geographic areas. Thus, DHMZ’s experts contribute to the development and adaptation of the ACCORD consortium's numerical model software code. They also work on implementing high-resolution models, developing frameworks for post-processing data and artificial intelligence, designing data flows, and modeling the impact of extreme weather events on areas such as renewable energy and wildfires.
Through this project, our experts are not only improving the accuracy of weather forecasts in Europe, but also enhancing DHMZ’s capacity to issue timely warnings about hazardous weather events. This includes forecasts of weather conditions that have a significant impact on sectors such as maritime, transportation, agriculture, and renewable energy, said the Director-General of DHMZ, Ivan Güttler.
The Zagreb meeting takes place after the start of the second phase of DestinE in June this year. The second phase includes the implementation, consolidation and continuous evolution of key system components. In addition to creating the first two Digital Twins of the Earth System — one for extreme weather events and the other for climate change adaptation — ECMWF and its partners also implement the Digital Twin Engine (DTE). The DTE is a complex software infrastructure that allows to run the digital twins on the EuroHPC facilities, and to access, handle and interact with their data and workflows. The Digital Twins data will feed into the DestinE Data Lake, developed by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), which will provide users with access to large amounts of data from various sources. This wealth of data will be accessed via the DestinE Core Service Platform, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to give users access to the tools, applications, and services of the DestinE initiative.
This project stands out for its use of a large volume of data from different sources, requiring substantial data and computing resources. Meteorologists are now utilizing cutting-edge European supercomputers with hybrid CPU-GPU infrastructure for the first time. One such example is the EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer – the first pre-exascale supercomputer in Europe, with a capacity of 375 petaflops, making it 1,000 times more powerful than DHMZ's supercomputer.
Thanks to this initiative, Europe will be better prepared to respond to major natural disasters, adapt to climate change and extremes, and assess the potential socioeconomic and political impacts of such events on our communities.
More about the Destination Earth initiative:
Building a highly accurate digital twin of the Earth »
Destination Earth »
More about the role of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) »
More about the role of Croatian Meteorological and Hydrological Service (DHMZ) »