Climate Adaptation Digital Twin transforming climate data to actionable information

Destination Earth (DestinE) program develops high-precision digital twins (DTs) of the Earth to support decision making in Europe and thus enable more sustainable development and increased resilience against environmental changes. Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT in brief) is one of the first priority DTs developed within DestinE. It will provide capabilities supporting climate change adaptation at regional and national levels at multi-decadal time scales. We introduce here the first prototype of Climate DT developed during Phase 1 of DestinE.

The Climate DT system is built around three one-kilometer-scale Earth-system models (ESMs); ICON, IFS-NEMO and IFS-FESOM. The ESMs have been adapted to run on the fastest supercomputer in Europe, EuroHPC LUMI that is in operation in Kajaani, Finland. The Climate DT system will also harness another state-of-the-art EuroHPC system, MareNostrum 5 that will become operational during 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. The extreme computing capacities provided by these systems enable Climate DT to perform global climate simulations at an unprecedented scale: multi-decadal simulation on 5 km global meshes. This enables providing globally consistent climate information at local levels.  

Climate DT introduces a novel approach where ESMs and impact-sector applications operate as part of the same workflow and the output of the ESMs is streamed to applications on real-time in a standardized form called generic state vector (GSV). This approach enables users to access the full model state as soon as it has been produced by the ESMs. It also makes the system scalable across an unlimited number of applications and solves a technical challenge of handling huge amounts of data. Most importantly, this new climate information system enables transforming climate data to actionable information. During Phase 1 of DestinE, this approach is demonstrated through five impact-sector applications that provide information on (1) wind energy supply and demand, (2) wildfire risk and emissions (3) river flows and fresh water availability, (4) hydrometeorological extreme events, and (5) heat stress in urban environments.  

In this presentation, we will present the overview of the first prototype of Climate DT, including technical design of the system, performed simulations and implications for the users. We will also discuss the plans for the future development of the system.