Among the key presentations at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Egypt from November 6 to 18, 2022, will be one on Destination Earth (DestinE), a European-led initiative that showcases the unique part being played by digital twins in monitoring climate change.
Destination Earth is expected to play a crucial role in helping to anticipate both natural disasters and human environmental damage and the future implications of that for Europe and the world. Destination Earth plans to produce a highly accurate digital model of the Earth—its digital twin—to monitor and predict environmental change and its effects on human life.
This November 10 session at the UN conference, known as COP27, will give participants an insight into how Europe’s digital, data, and high-performance computing infrastructure will power the digital twins of Destination Earth, and how it can be used to accelerate both green and digital developments.
The plan for DestinE
The European Union first announced plans for its DestinE project in late 2020, with the intention to create multiple digital twins of Earth, including one digital twin for extreme natural disasters and another for climate change adaptation.
DestinE is being developed with the help of institutions such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
DestinE was officially launched in March 2022 and the COP27 event provides a timely opportunity to announce new developments as collaboration truly gets underway.
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By GlobalDataECMWF, which is leading the creation of the extreme weather digital twin as well as developing the ‘Digital Twin Engine’ that will power both digital twins, will be supported by France’s national meteorological service, Météo-France, after the weather organization won a bid to develop the digital twin’s on-demand component.
Climate change adaptation
The second of the main digital twins will focus on climate change adaptation, to provide a configurable climate information system that enables global climate simulations at so-called “multidecadal timescales.” The Finnish supercomputing center CSC will develop the second digital twin, using its own LUMI supercomputer, which perhaps appropriately is powered almost entirely by renewable energy.
The list of participating institutions is a who’s who of supercomputing and meteorological powerhouses, including the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany; Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC); the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate in Italy; the German Climate Computing Centre; the National Meteorological Service of Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; HPE; the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology; the Polytechnic University of Turin; the Catholic University of Louvain; the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research; and the University of Helsinki.
The clock is ticking for DestinE
The DestinE project has several key milestones. 2024 is the first, which is when a core service platform, an accompanying data lake, and the first two digital twins on extreme natural events and climate change adaptation are expected to have been developed.
By 2027, further enhancement of the DestinE system and integration of additional digital twins and related services are also expected to be in place. The ultimate goal by 2030 is the creation of a ‘full’ digital replica of the Earth. By then, delegates at this and subsequent COPs will certainly be hoping for tangible evidence of progress toward combatting climate change.
