Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin
What is the Climate DT?
The DestinE Digital Twin for Climate Change Adaptation (Climate DT) supports adaptation activities through the provision of innovative climate information on multi-decadal timescales, globally, at scales at which the impacts of climate change are observed. This initiative presents the first ever attempt to operationalise the production of global multi-decadal climate projections at resolutions of 5 to 10km, leveraging the world-leading supercomputing facilities of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking along with some of the leading European climate models.
The Climate DT is developed by a partnership led by CSC, currently involving 12 leading climate institutions, supercomputing centres, national meteorological services, academia and industrial partners, through a contract procured by ECMWF.
Factsheets on the Climate DT
The DestinE factsheets provide a concise overview of the Climate DT. The general factsheet covers a comprehensive description of different concepts essential for an understanding of the Digital Twin’s characteristics. Find additional technical information with an overview of available and planned simulations in the specialised fact sheet.
Click the photo to view the full PDF factsheet
General factsheet on Climate Adaptation Digital Twin
Specialised factsheet on Climate Adaptation Digital Twin
Brief overview
The Climate DT aims to create an operational framework for producing global multi-decadal climate projections (until 2050), both regularly and on-demand. This bespoke simulation capability allows to address ‘what-if’ questions related to the impact of certain scenarios or policy decisions on the evolution of our planet, or to create storylines of how extreme events already experienced by climate-vulnerable sectors may look over the next decades . It will support decision-making for climate change adaptation and the implementation of the European Green Deal.
This digital twin relies on global km-scale climate models and flexible workflows, including directly linked impact models and applications that translate climate data into actionable information on climate change impacts for impact sectors like wind energy or water management, through a co-design approach. Key features include the development of an operational framework that includes monitoring and evaluation, and interactivity elements, allowing enhanced responsiveness to emerging user needs. The involvement of selected users from the start has been key to ensure that they will obtain the climate information they require.
The Climate DT will complement current climate modelling activities by:
- providing globally consistent data with higher temporal and spatial resolution (5 to 10 km globally instead of more than 100 km, hourly instead of 6‑hourly output)
- operationally producing updated quality-controlled climate information routinely (yearly or less compared to every seven to ten years today)
- providing a framework to perform bespoke, on-demand climate simulations
- considering the needs of users in terms of output variables and simulation design
A comparison of the resolution used within DestinE and the 1° standard resolution. Not only is the spatial resolution higher, but the temporal frequency is also higher. The images show the temperature and wind at the surface. The data come from the simulation of the SSP3-7.0 scenario using the IFS-NEMO model (with a resolution of 4.4 km for the atmosphere and land and 1/12th of a degree for the ocean and sea ice). Credit: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Models
The Climate DT exploits and further evolves a new generation of global storm-resolving and eddy-rich models built through a cooperative model development approach. It is supported by the EU Horizon projects nextGEMS and EERIE as well as national projects, such as WarmWorld in Germany and Gloria in Spain, involving dozens of leading climate and weather centres, supercomputing centres and academia throughout Europe. The three models used are ICON, IFS-NEMO and IFS-FESOM. They are run at resolutions ranging between 5 and 10 km for the different Earth-system components (atmosphere, land, ocean and sea ice).
- ICON is the ICOsahedral Non-hydrostatic model developed by the German Meteorological Service (DWD), the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM)
- IFS-NEMO is ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) coupled to the latest release of the NEMO ocean model implemented by BSC in collaboration with ECMWF
- IFS-FESOM is the ECMWF IFS coupled to the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Finite-VolumE Sea ice–Ocean Model
A simulation of surface temperature from one of the prototype projections of the Climate DT performed on EuroHPC LUMI with IFS-NEMO (at 4.4 km resolution for atmosphere and land and 1/12 degrees for ocean and sea ice). Credit: ECMWF / Andreas Müller / LUMI
Simulations
The Climate DT is simulating several decades covering the recent past and the future up to 2050. The simulations of the past are used to evaluate the model quality before using the future projection to quantify how characteristics of the climate and weather change over the next decades.
The simulation protocol is inspired by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and in particular by the High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP). DestinE further adapts these protocols for km-scale simulations, which complement the existing climate projections.
The overview tab below provides a table of simulations carried out so far on LUMI that are available in the Data Lake. Data access instructions can be found after the table.
These first global climate simulations at 5 to 10 km resolution are provide as is. Work on evaluation and uncertainty quantification is ongoing and more information will be made available next year.
| Type of simulation | Model | Resolution | Period |
| Future projection
|
ICON | 5km across Earth system components | 2020-2039 |
| Future projection
|
IFS-NEMO | 4.4 km atmosphere, 1/12 ocean/sea-ice | 2020-2039 |
| Historical simulation
|
ICON | 10km atmosphere, 5km ocean/sea-ice | 1990-2019 |
| Historical simulation
|
IFS-NEMO | 9 km atmosphere, 1/12 ocean/sea-ice | 1990-2001 |
| Storyline simulation past climate
|
IFS-FESOM | 9 km atmosphere, 5km ocean/sea-ice | 2017-2023 |
| Storyline simulation present climate
|
IFS-FESOM | 9 km atmosphere, 5km ocean/sea-ice | 2017-2023 |
| Storyline simulation future climate
|
IFS-FESOM | 9 km atmosphere, 5km ocean/sea-ice | 2017-2023 |
Additional simulations have been carried out on Mare Nostrum 5 and will soon become available on the data bridge, including a IFS-FESOM 5 km future projection, a 9 km IFS-FESOM historical and control simulation, and extensions of storyline simulations to cover 2024.
Starting in 1990, the forcing follows observed changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols etc. until 2020. The simulations are using standardised CMIP6 forcing. Historical simulations are essential for model evaluation and quality control as they allow a comparison to observations.
To project how climate will change on a global and local scale in the future, forcing changes according to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) 3-7.0 scenario from ScenarioMIP. The SSP3-7.0 scenario explores a future with a continuous increase in CO2 emissions with no strong mitigation efforts. In phase 1, all DestinE projections follow this scenario. In the future, alternative future scenarios will be explored. Phase 1 projections are initialised in 2020 from reanalysis followed by a 5-year ocean spin-up. In Phase 2, scenario simulations will extend the historical simulations.
Storyline simulations offer a what-if capability to explore how a weather event we experienced in the recent past would change in a warmer climate and how it would have looked in past pre-industrial conditions. To constrain simulated weather events, a nudging approach is used to keep the simulated large-scale flow close to the ERA5 reanalysis for the period 2017 – 2023. Processes on smaller scales and thermodynamic processes are free to evolve, which allows scientists to study e.g. how extreme precipitation would change in a warmer world for a weather event observed in present-day conditions. Initial conditions are taken from ocean-only spinup simulations for 1950 and 2017, and from the IFS-FESOM projection for a +2 °C world. Storyline simulations will be updated regularly to include most recent months. The next update will extend all storylines to include 2024.
Repetitive 1990 forcing with no change in forcing over time. These simulations allow to quantify model drift and simulated inter-annual variability and provides relevant context for interpreting historical and scenario simulations.
For coupled climate simulations, it is essential to bring the ocean close to an equilibrated state before launching the coupled simulation. For the historical simulations, the ocean models are initialised from a reanalysis in 1985, and then forced by ERA5 for 5 years. In 1990, a coupled 2-year spinup with perpetual 1990 forcing starts from the ocean-only spinup to reduce the coupling shock. This coupled spinup is then used to provide the initial conditions for the historical simulations starting in 1990. For the scenario simulations, the ocean-only spinup is running from 2015 – 2019 with ERA5 forcing and is directly initialising the coupled future projection with no coupled spinup. The Climate DT will continue to explore and improve spinup strategies in the future and run scenario projections as a direct continuation of the historical simulations.
Access the Climate DT data
Climate DT data can be accessed by registering on the DestinE Service Platform and requesting upgraded access.
Native model output at high resolution can be retrieved using the polytope service.
Various parameters for the ocean, atmosphere, sea ice and land are included in the data portfolio with a full list provided on the DestinE ClimateDT Parameters page. Examples for retrieving, analysing, and plotting data are provided here.
The Harmonised Data Access (HDA) offers access to entire DestinE Data Portfolio, via a single API, allowing to access the multiple diverse datasets included in the data portfolio. It also utilises the polytope API without modifying the digital twins data.
Various services available on the DestinE platform can be used to explore Climate DT data.