Updates on the climate change adaptation Digital Twin
The Destination Earth digital twin has achieved notable recognition over the last few months with a nomination for the prestigious Gordon Bell prize.
It’s been an exciting time for Destination Earth’s (DestinE) Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin, also known as the Climate DT, with an award nomination, a user story, a tool to evaluate the quality of simulations and a new paper highlighting the Climate DT’s novelties.
The Climate DT, which is a key aspect of the European Commission’s flagship DestinE initiative, is implemented by CSC – IT Center for Science in partnership with a consortium of leading European research and supercomputing centres and ECMWFEuropean Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts More, the Climate DT delivers multi-decadal global climate projections at kilometre-scale resolution. The system also enables what-if scenario simulations, called storylines simulations, to explore the possible outcomes of extreme weather events in different climate scenarios. The Climate DT thus enables unprecedented detail on climate change projections, complementing existing prediction capabilities, and supporting climate adaptation policies.
Here is a summary of the latest updates on the Climate DT:
Nomination for prestigious ACM Gordon Bell Prize
The Climate DT has been shortlisted for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, one of the most prestigious awards in high-performance computing.
The nomination recognises the Climate DT’s achievement of running the first-ever multi-decadal, fully coupled global climate simulations at ~5 km resolution on two of Europe’s EuroHPC systems – LUMIOne of the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers, hosted and o More (CSC – IT Center for Science) and MareNostrum 5 (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), the scaling of two of the Climate DT models, ICON and IFS-FESOM, up to 1 km global resolution across all Earth system components on both machines.
The winners will be announced at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25) in November in St. Louis, USA, where ECMWFEuropean Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts More scientist Ioan Hadade will also present the submission along with the other finalists.
User story: The Climate DT for wind energy planning
The Climate DT is working closely with the wind energy sector to provide tailored, kilometre-scale climate information that supports Europe’s clean energy transition.
As the wind energy sector continues to expand, the need for detailed and timely climate information is growing. This is key to guiding adaptation, identifying suitable locations, and in the long run, supporting Europe’s efforts to increase the share of renewables and ensure a stable energy supply.
Addressing these challenges in climate-vulnerable sectors like wind energy is a key priority of the Climate DT. For wind energy, this means producing specific indicators that help planners and operators make better-informed decisions in a changing climate.
Read the full story and watch a video testimonial from Roberto Chavez (OW Ocean Winds), who shares his experience as a user of the Climate DT
New paper highlights novel capabilities of the Climate DT
A new paper on the Climate DT is now in open discussion in the journal for Geoscientific Model Development.
Led by Francisco J. Doblas Reyes (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) and Jenni Kontkanen (CSC – IT Center for Science), with contributions from over 100 scientists, the paper describes the innovative Climate DT system: from multi-decadal, kilometre-scale projections and storyline simulations to co-designed impact sector applications and integrated AI/ML technologies. This digital twin is demonstrating a transformative approach to producing climate information for decision-making.
AQUA: an essential element for evaluating the quality of simulations of the Climate DT
The Application for QUality Assessment (AQUA) is an open-source software package developed to support the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) of the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative.
This framework is developed by Italy’s National Council of Research (CNR) and Politecnico di Torino under a contract run by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with contributions from other partners working on the Climate DT . AQUA enables real-time evaluation and uncertainty quantification of the Climate DT simulations. This framework provides a wide range of diagnostics and metrics to assess the quality of climate model outputs produced at km-scale resolution.
By delivering consistent, real-time analysis of key climate indicators, AQUA plays a key role in ensuring the model robustness and trustworthiness and ultimately the quality of Climate DT simulations for users, modellers and scientists.