Destination Earth moves into Phase Three
Today, the European Commission confirmed that Destination Earth (DestinE) will move into its next stage in July 2026. The Councils of the three organisations that deliver DestinE – ECMWF, ESA, and EUMETSAT – jointly endorsed this decision.
The new 24-month phase will turn DestinE into a system that more people across Europe can use to support real climate decisions. ECMWF will evolve DestinE’s two digital twins, ESA will improve how people access services on the DestinE Platform and EUMETSAT will enhance and mature the Data Lake.
Roberto Viola, Director-General of the DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission said, “Destination Earth demonstrates how Europe can transform major investments in supercomputing and artificial intelligence into concrete benefits for its citizens. By uniting world-class EuroHPC infrastructure, cutting-edge AI Factories, and Europe’s unparalleled expertise in climate and weather science, DestinE strengthens our collective capability to anticipate climate and weather threats — and to act decisively on them. This is how Europe builds resilience.”
“ECMWF is pleased to contribute to the third phase of this forward-looking EU initiative, which brings together European knowledge, technology and innovation for the benefit of society. The third phase will enable us to consolidate the digital twins while taking the next major steps towards delivering an AI Earth-system model, building on the combined expertise of ECMWF, our Member States and partners. By integrating physical understanding with innovative AI approaches, we will further enhance Europe’s capabilities to prepare and adapt to climate change and extreme events,” said Florian Pappenberger, Director-General of ECMWF.
“Progressing to the next phase of DestinE is excellent news – the unprecedented levels of accuracy will enable users to explore how our Earth system will react and evolve for decades ahead. This flagship initiative not only builds on European modelling capabilities and Earth observation data, but it also underlines the strength and potential of European partnership,” ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli.
“With the confirmation from EUMETSAT Council of our continuing participation in Destination Earth, we stand ready to build on our successes from the first two phases and work with our fellow entrusted entities to progress the system’s operational maturity. The Data Lake is the essential binding layer between the Digital Twins, the DestinE Platform and users. The infrastructure and services that EUMETSAT has engineered, based on industrial standards, are already operational and placing an enormous wealth of data and compute resources at the fingertips of European institutional users, scientists and analysts,” said Phil Evans, Director-General of EUMETSAT.
The path so far
Building a digital replica of Earth takes time, effort, and many steps. Over the past four years, teams have worked steadily to turn DestinE from an idea into a real and usable asset.
The first delivery phase, which ran from December 2021 to June 2024, focused on preparing, testing and putting the main parts of DestinE in place. During this period, the teams delivered the first two Digital Twins, set up DestinE’s Data Lake, and built the DestinE Platform.
Throughout phase two, which began in June 2024, teams across DestinE have been working to move it from early testing into everyday use.
ECMWF has worked closely with over 100 partner organisations across Europe to advance DestinE’s digital twins. This has led to important developments towards the operationalisation of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) and the Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin (Extremes DT), and of the Digital Twin Engine which enables the running of the digital twins on the world-class systems of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, as well as handling and accessing their vast amounts of data.
These efforts have included regular production of extreme events simulations and climate projections, at scales at which the impacts of climate change and extreme events are observed. It also enabled addressing of “what-if” questions, which facilitate the exploration of climate change under different conditions, such as +2°C conditions. In parallel, a new set of global climate simulations covering the period 1990-2050 at 5 km resolution was initiated.
Phase two at ECMWF has also seen a substantial expansion of artificial intelligence activities, including the development of machine-learning components for different parts of the Earth system (land, ocean, sea ice, waves and hydrology), and AI-based solutions that enhance interactivity with digital twin data and AI models.
During the same period, ESA focused on the DestinE Platform. When the platform opened in October 2024, it became the main entry point to DestinE, where users can sign in, access data, explore services, run applications and onboard their own services. As capabilities expanded, the user community grew from zero to more than 5400 people, and the number of services increased from around ten to more than 30.
By the end of phase two, EUMETSAT will have delivered, via its implementation industry consortium led by CloudFerro together with CS-Group and EODC, the full operational capabilities and services of the DestinE Data Lake. This marks a significant milestone for DestinE overall. The Data Lake provides the data layer that underpins DestinE and links with the EuroHPC sites. Based on a European distributed data infrastructure and associated functions and services, the Data Lake allows users to tap into various data resources by enabling data processing close to where it is produced and stored.
These services were released to users in early 2025 and have seen a steady growth in take-up. Over 50 Edge Service access requests originating from a huge diversity of impact sectors have been received to date from organisations, including academic institutions, public authorities and SMEs. Performance has also been impressive, with all Data Lake services scoring over 99% for availability.
What the next years will bring
Phase three marks a transition for Destination Earth into operations, consolidating its key components into a system that supports public services, European industry, innovation and downstream applications.
In phase three, ECMWF and its partners will focus on operating and further evolving the Digital Twin Engine and the Climate and Extremes Digital Twins. The two digital twins will be increasingly interlinked, enabling joint “what-if” scenarios that combine long-term climate trajectories with detailed extreme-event simulations.
By maturing the Digital Twin Engine’s AI pipelines, the high-resolution digital twin simulations will be transformed into AI-ready datasets used both to further develop and couple the AI Earth-system components prototyped in phase two towards a modular AI Earth-system model, and to feed Europe’s emerging AI Factories. This will foster a new generation of AI-enabled weather and climate applications, supporting public authorities, European industry and the wider innovation ecosystem, and strengthening preparedness, resilience and innovation across Europe.
In parallel, ESA will take DestinE to more users while keeping the platform performant. They will keep improving how people move through the platform and how they access services. At the same time, ESA will run and strengthen a shared quality framework which will ensure that data and services meet agreed standards. This is important for users: by improving reliability and quality, ESA will enhance the user experience and establish trust in DestinE data. ESA will also scale up the use of artificial intelligence. This will help users experience smoother interactions on the platform and fast processing.
The top priorities for EUMETSAT in phase three are firstly the continuation and enhancement of Data Lake operations, along with increasing its maturity. Secondly, a lessons-learnt exercise reassessing current Data Lake concepts will be combined with measures to prepare for future requirements. Finally, EUMETSAT will ensure a strong focus on fostering institutional user uptake of DestinE.
These areas will go hand in hand with further incremental improvements of the Data Lake capabilities and Edge Services, in particular in support of DestinE AI activities and the European AI factories. The planned improvements will prepare for the further evolution of DestinE and AI-related activities planned as part of the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework.
Additional information
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