Work is set to begin within months on building 鈥渄igital twins鈥� of Earth to better predict the future of climate change, extreme weather and the environment. The aims to create a crucial tool for everyone from politicians and city planners to energy companies and reinsurance firms to simulate in unprecedented detail how human and physical systems will change in a warming world.
Three digital twins are initially planned, which would be detailed simulacrums of reality built on satellite and field data covering extreme weather and disaster risk management, climate change adaptation and the state of the oceans. More twins will come later.
The European Union is funding the project and sees it as vital to informing government decisions on the 聽which aims to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. For example, some twins could allow policy-makers to model the future impact of swapping out gas power stations for renewables, or one crop for another.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 key for us and future generations. We have so much data and computing and we need to use it better to support environmental objectives,鈥� says Massimo Craglia at the European Commission鈥檚 Joint Research Centre (JRC).
Peter Bauer at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), one of three groups being consulted on the project, says it will accelerate efforts to model Earth. 鈥淚f you look at the evolution of climate models, IPCC [the UN climate science panel] assessments, all these models are getting better. But it鈥檚 clear they are not fit enough to provide decision-making information at a national or regional level, such as how extreme weather patterns are going to change in the next decade.鈥�
Destination Earth should bring a dramatically improved level of mapping resolution 鈥� greater detail at a local level 鈥� than most observations and modelling today. It will also layer machine learning on top to make sense of the patterns in the petabytes of data produced daily by the European Space Agency (ESA), ECMWF and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.
鈥淚t鈥檚 certainly a level up, in terms of getting a better insight into the processes of our planet, with different observations and modelling and AI. And to have a better forecasting and simulation capability, and especially respond to 鈥渨hat if鈥� scenarios,鈥� says Josef Aschbacher at ESA. Those scenarios could include how extreme weather will affect a specific city for the next decade or how southern Europe will have to adapt as more arid conditions lead to more fires and drought, he says.
The digital twins won鈥檛 replace climate models, says Bauer. However, they could help climate scientists by allowing them to plug their model into the system to run at a better resolution, with more processes such as cloud formation and with more 鈥渆nsembles鈥� of models, in which parameters are slightly tweaked and models run many times to assess likely outcomes. Around 30 ways to use Destination Earth have been compiled and a report on those by the JRC is due to published in about two months鈥� time.
Brexit means the UK will miss out on hosting the project,聽despite enthusiasm within the UK government for digital twins聽and the fact that聽potential host ECMWF is based in Reading. As the UK is leaving the EU, the EU-funded ECMWF has started procurement for a new location in an EU member state. Destination Earth could also be hosted at an ESA location in the EU.
The budget for the project hasn鈥檛 been published yet, but Bauer says it will be significant. An earlier vision of a similar scheme known as Extreme Earth had been allocated a budget of 鈧�10 billion over 10 years before it was axed, but Destination Earth will probably cost less.聽If a budget is agreed by the European Commission before the year鈥檚 end, as is hoped, work will begin on Destination Earth early next year. The twin should be available for use by 2023.
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