Exploring the challenges of Digital Twins for weather & climate through an Atmospheric Dispersion modelling prototype

Digital Twins present a new user-centric paradigm for developing and using weather & climate simulations that is currently being widely embraced, for example through large projects such as Destination Earth led by ECMWF.  In this project we have taken a smaller scale approach in understanding the opportunities and challenges in translating the Digital Twin concept from the original domain of manufacturing and the built environment to modelling of the earth’s atmosphere.

We describe our approach to creating a Digital Twin based on the Met Office’s Atmospheric Dispersion simulation package called NAME. We will discuss the advantages of doing this, such as the ability of nonexpert users to more easily produce scientifically valid simulations of dispersion events, such as industrial fires, and easily obtain results to feed into downstream analysis, for example of health impacts. We will describe the requirements of each of the key components of a digital twin and potential implementation approaches.

We will describe how a Digital Twin framework enables multiple models to be joined together to model complex systems as required for atmospheric concentrations around chemical spills or fires modelled by NAME. Overall, we outline a potential project blueprint for future work to improve usability and scientific throughput of existing modelling systems by creating a Digital Twins from core current modelling code and data gathering systems.