Earth Observation Based Digital Twin Components of the Earth System

Climate change represents one of the most urgent challenges facing society today, with rising sea levels, increasing ocean acidification, more frequent and intense extreme events such as floods, heat waves and droughts, impacting across different sectors, ecosystems, and endangering human lives and property. Population growth is also expected to amplify current pressures on critical resources such as freshwater and food, intensify the stress on land and marine ecosystems, and increase environmental pollution, impacting health and biodiversity.  

The latest advances in Earth Observation (EO) science and R&D activities are opening the door to a new generation of EO data products, novel applications and scientific breakthroughs offering a novel, advanced and holistic view of the Earth system, its processes, and its interactions with human activities and ecosystems. These emerging capabilities offer unique opportunities for an enhanced and extensive use of EO technology in the development of digital twins. In particular, those EO developments together with new advances in sectorial modelling, computing capabilities, AI and digital technologies offer excellent building blocks to realise novel EO-based Digital Twin Components (EO DTCs) that may contribute and maximise the impact of EO satellite technology in the design and implementation of future operational Digital Twins

The ESA Digital Twin Earth programme aims at developing and demonstrating, to a pre-operational stage, a set of EO-based DTCs as advanced replicas of key components of the Earth system including their interactions with human activities and ecosystems. These EO DTCs shall be designed to serve a wide variety of users and with a strong focus on valorising the role of EO capabilities. With this presentation, we highlight ESA’s basic principles and functional design elements for the development of EO-based DTCs, provide a scientific and technical roadmap for the development of future DTCs, along with their interaction with the DestinE initiative. Furthermore, we will highlight the eight priority thematic domains for DTC development, based on feedback from the scientific community, and highlight the tasks to be undertaken to achieve DTC demonstrators. This includes, allowing users to access, analyse, visualise and interact with advanced EO-data, represent Earth system processes and feedbacks, scientifically sound integration of EO-data, models, AI, hybrid methods to generate high spatial and temporal resolution datasets, and facilitating what-if scenarios.