Climate Digital Twin to support climate change adaptation efforts

Climate change is expected to have far reaching impacts on human and natural systems during the 21stcentury. To guide policy decisions on climate change adaptation and mitigation, there is a need for developing new types of climate information systems that can provide timely information on regional and local impacts of climate change. The European Commission’s Destination Earth (DestinE) programme aims towards this by developing high precision digital twins (DT) of the Earth. We present here the overview of one of the two first priority DTs, Climate Change Adaptation DT. The Climate DT will encompass a pre-exascale climate information system that can support climate change adaptation efforts.

The Climate DT harnesses two different kilometer-scale Earth-system models (ESMs), ICON and IFS-FESOM/NEMO. The models will be adapted to two EuroHPC pre-exascale computing systems: LUMI that is currently in operation in Kajaani, Finland, and Mare Nostrum 5 that will be available during 2023 in Barcelona, Spain.

The Climate DT introduces the idea of a generic state vector (GSV), which is evolved by the ESMs and streamed to applications. This enables the ESMs to work at an unprecedented scale (multi-decadal simulations on 5km or finer global meshes) and thus improves the fidelity of the information the models provide as well as its relevance for the users.  This approach also creates the basis for an information system that can scale across an unlimited number of applications and enable interactivity during the future phases of DestinE.

Use cases from different impact sectors are implemented within Climate DT as applications that operate on the streamed GSV. The Climate DT will explore five use cases which will provide information on (1) wind energy supply and demand, (2) wildfire risk and emissions, (3) river flows, (4) hydrometeorological extreme events, and (5) heat stress in urban environments. Additional applications operating on the GSV include a quality assessment and uncertainty quantification framework, used for monitoring and evaluation of the GSV. This framework will utilize observational operators to evaluate the GSV against observational data, and in so doing enable the use of tools from numerical weather prediction for quality assessment and observation-based model tuning.

In this presentation, we will give an overview of the Climate DT, describing the objectives for the first phase, technical design of the DT, and the progress made so far. The use cases and the new possibilities provided by the streaming of the GSV are discussed in more detail by Doblas-Reyes et al., and the development of the digital infrastructure for Climate DT by Narayanappa et al.