Advances towards a better prediction of weather extremes in the Destination Earth initiative

Destination Earth – DestinE – is an ambitious initiative of the European Commission, in support of its Digital Strategy and the Green Deal. Bringing together scientific and industrial excellence from across Europe, DestinE will contribute to revolutionising the European capability to monitor and predict our changing planet, complementing existing national (meteorological services) and European efforts (Copernicus services).

Based on the integration of extreme-scale computing, Earth system simulations, and the real-time exploitation of all available environmental observations, and machine learning techniques, DestinE will develop high-accuracy digital twins, or replicas, of the Earth.  DestinE will thus allow users to better explore the evolution of the Earth system, and to test a range of scenarios and potential mitigation strategies.

Under the European Commission's leadership, and in coordination with the Member States, scientific communities and other stakeholders, ECMWF, ESA and EUMETSAT are the three entrusted entities tasked with delivering the first phase of the DestinE by 2024.

ECMWF is responsible for building the ‘digital twin engine’ software and data infrastructure and for using it to deliver the first two high-priority digital twins, while European Space Agency (ESA) provides the platform through which users will access the service, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) develops the data repository.

This talk will give a high-level introduction to the initiative, and it will particularly focus on one of the first two priority digital twins that ECMWF is developing: The Digital Twin on Weather-Induced and Geophysical Extremes (Extremes DT). This Digital Twin will provide capabilities and services for the assessment and prediction of environmental extremes from global to local scale, on a time scale of a few days ahead.

In this talk, we will particularly focus on the global, continuous component of the Extremes DT, that we are developing at ECMWF using our Integrated Forecasting System. We will showcase results from simulations at 4.5km and 2.8km resolution, to illustrate the benefits of the resolution increase for the representation of extreme events such as tropical cyclones, medicanes or intense precipitation events in mountainous regions. We will also discuss the lessons learned regarding aspects of the forecasting system that need to be further improved to exploit the advantages of the resolution increase for better representing extreme events.