Understanding DestinE's Digital Twins

Predictive Maintanance

The idea behind a digital twin

Digital twins are virtual (or digital) representations of products, people, processes and even spatial environments.

Initially used in industrial sectors, a digital twin uses a fusion of numerical simulations and observations to create a virtual replica which is undistinguishable from reality. This allows to understand how the product will perform in the physical world and to explore how it can be adapted to improve its performance.

This process allows for what is called the “predictive maintenance”. This refers to the ability to find solutions to potential problems with a product, enabling an endless amount of feedback loops, to take decisions and actions related to the real product.

DestinE boosts European capabilities in support of the European Commission’s Green Deal, Data strategy and Digital Strategy, complementing existing efforts in this direction from national and European environmental services like the national meteorological services and the Copernicus services.

A digital twin of the Earth system

A digital replica of the Earth system can represent a gamechanger in the context of climate change and the related increase of extreme weather events.

By using a fusion of cutting edge Earth-system physical and data-driven models and observations, it produces simulations which become indistinguishable from the reality, allowing to understand and simulate the complex interactions of the different phenomena which determine how our planet will evolve.

It also allows testing scenarios to assess the impact of human activities and to support actions in response to the environmental challenges the world is facing.

It can thus support decision-making and address the need for enhanced, and more interactive, prediction capabilities.

This is what motivated the development of a digital twin of the Earth system in the Destination Earth initiative.

DestinE Digital Twins

Several digital twins will be developed over the course of different phases of Destination Earth, with two high-priority digital twins currently being developed in the first phase. While the technology behind these two twins relies on the same foundations, the way they operate is slightly different.

ECMWF is responsible for implementing these digital twins, and the Digital Twin Engine, the software infrastructure needed to power the digital twins, on Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, those of the European joint undertaking (EuroHPC). For this purpose, ECMWF is closely working with over 60 partners from over 20 countries.

First two high-priority Digital Twins

nicholas-doherty-ponbhdyofom-unsplash-2554x1655

On weather-induced extremes 

The objective of the Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin is to support the close to real-time response to meteorological, hydrological and air quality extremes, on a timescale of a few days ahead. This will be key in supporting response actions to environmental challenges posed by extreme events. The global continuous component of the weather induced extremes Digital Twin is implemented by ECMWF, and the on-demand regional component is implemented by a partnership led by Météo France.

thomas-dewey-bctkhvwgakm-unsplash-2607x1738

On climate adaptation

The objective of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin is to support the efforts of defining and planning activities linked to climate change adaptation on multi-decadal timescales. This will be key in supporting the elaboration of policies for the Green Deal.

The climate digital twin is implemented by a partnership led by CSC.

Features

Irina Sandu

“DestinE’s Digital Twins build on decades of progress in numerical weather prediction, climate modelling, observations and supercomputing. They exploit the latest breakthroughs in weather and climate science, digital technologies and machine learning, are enabled by the world-leading supercomputing facilities of EuroHPC.”

Irina Sandu, ECMWF Director of Destination Earth

Digital Twin
Features

QUALITY

Quality of the provided information.

INTEGRATION

Provision of integrated earth-system and impact sector information.

INTERACTIVITY

Interactive and configurable access to all data, models and workflows.

Quality

The digital twins will provide high-quality information from global to local scale, based on better simulations performed with more realistic Earth-system models and a better observation-simulation fusion.

To make a weather forecast and simulate future climate scenarios, scientists use numerical models that carve up Earth’ surface into a large number of grid cells, vertically and horizontally, constituting very small zones.

The size of these cells is what is generally called the resolution of the model.

The higher the resolution, the more cells there are.

The models for global weather forecasts running at operational centers use a resolution of 9 km at best for the atmosphere and land surface, while global climate models generally use a resolution of about 100 km,  and occasionally a resolution of at best 25 km.

The highest resolution used for the ocean and sea-ice for both weather and climate simulations is of 25 km.

Weather forecasts have a time horizon of about 15 days while climate models are used for projections of Earth’s climate evolution decades to centuries ahead.

At the resolutions used today for global weather and climate predictions, a number of important small-scale processes which are important for both extreme events, and the evolution of the climate system, are not directly represented by solving the equations of the atmospheric or oceanic flow.

Small-scale processes that are not explicitly simulated need to be therefore parameterised, meaning that their effects on the atmospheric or oceanic flow are accounted for through simplified assumptions.

Towards the "km scale"

The new generation of Earth system models

Increasing the model resolution beyond that used today for global weather forecasts and climate projections towards the km-scale allows to represent such processes more directly.  Prototype simulations at such resolutions, performed by the Japanese NICAM group since several years, and more recently in Europe at ECMWF which performed the first seasonal integrations at 1.4km on the ONRL Summit supercomputer in the US, and at the Max Planck institute for Meteorology, demonstrate the potential to improve simulation realism.

An important component for ensuring simulation quality and demonstrating trustworthiness is model evaluation and uncertainty quantification. As part of the development of the digital twins, a framework is being developed to continuously monitor and evaluate the simulations and quantify uncertainties by using observations and machine learning.

The development of the first DestinE Digital Twins is based on prototypes of so-called “storm-and-eddy-resolving models”, such as those developed in the context of European Horizon 2020 project nextGEMS. This new generation of models has much finer resolutions ranging from about 2 to 5 km, in the atmosphere, over land and over oceans and sea-ice. This allows to explicitly represent, at least in part, essential climate processes such as: storms, precipitating deep convection, the effects of the mountains, cities or lakes on the atmosphere, the effects of ocean eddies on the ocean heat transport, and cracks in the sea ice.

The on-demand regional component of the Weather induced extreme DTeven considers much higher sub-km scale resolutions, of the order of 500 to 700 m over the European domain.

It is only thanks to the advances in supercomputing and the emergence of Europe’s first generation of pre-exascale computers that we can consider to perform simulations at such resolutions for weather and multi-decadal climate timescales in the first two digital twins.

A decade of investments in scalability, for example in the ECMWF Scalability programme, is also playing an important role in enabling this new leap.

The first global coupled simulations at these storm-and-eddy-resolving resolutions performed in nextGEMS offer glimpses into the potential breakthroughs in simulation realism that these models can bring.

Quality

The digital twins will provide high-quality information from global to local scale, based on better simulations performed with more realistic Earth-system models and a better observation-simulation fusion.

To make a weather forecast and simulate future climate scenarios, scientists use numerical models that carve up Earth’ surface into a large number of grid cells, vertically and horizontally, constituting very small zones.

The size of these cells is what is generally called the resolution of the model.

The higher the resolution, the more cells there are.

The models for global weather forecasts running at operational centers use a resolution of 9 km at best for the atmosphere and land surface, while global climate models generally use a resolution of about 100 km,  and occasionally a resolution of at best 25 km.

The highest resolution used for the ocean and sea-ice for both weather and climate simulations is of 25 km.

Weather forecasts have a time horizon of about 15 days while climate models are used for projections of Earth’s climate evolution decades to centuries ahead.

At the resolutions used today for global weather and climate predictions, a number of important small-scale processes which are important for both extreme events, and the evolution of the climate system, are not directly represented by solving the equations of the atmospheric or oceanic flow.

Small-scale processes that are not explicitly simulated need to be therefore parameterised, meaning that their effects on the atmospheric or oceanic flow are accounted for through simplified assumptions.

Towards the "km scale"

The new generation of Earth system models

Increasing the model resolution beyond that used today for global weather forecasts and climate projections towards the km-scale allows to represent such processes more directly.  Prototype simulations at such resolutions, performed by the Japanese NICAM group since several years, and more recently in Europe at ECMWF which performed the first seasonal integrations at 1.4km on the ONRL Summit supercomputer in the US, and at the Max Planck institute for Meteorology, demonstrate the potential to improve simulation realism.

An important component for ensuring simulation quality and demonstrating trustworthiness is model evaluation and uncertainty quantification. As part of the development of the digital twins, a framework is being developed to continuously monitor and evaluate the simulations and quantify uncertainties by using observations and machine learning.

The development of the first DestinE Digital Twins is based on prototypes of so-called “storm-and-eddy-resolving models”, such as those developed in the context of European Horizon 2020 project nextGEMS. This new generation of models has much finer resolutions ranging from about 2 to 5 km, in the atmosphere, over land and over oceans and sea-ice. This allows to explicitly represent, at least in part, essential climate processes such as: storms, precipitating deep convection, the effects of the mountains, cities or lakes on the atmosphere, the effects of ocean eddies on the ocean heat transport, and cracks in the sea ice.

The on-demand regional component of the Weather induced extreme DTeven considers much higher sub-km scale resolutions, of the order of 500 to 700 m over the European domain.

It is only thanks to the advances in supercomputing and the emergence of Europe’s first generation of pre-exascale computers that we can consider to perform simulations at such resolutions for weather and multi-decadal climate timescales in the first two digital twins.

A decade of investments in scalability, for example in the ECMWF Scalability programme, is also playing an important role in enabling this new leap.

The first global coupled simulations at these storm-and-eddy-resolving resolutions performed in nextGEMS offer glimpses into the potential breakthroughs in simulation realism that these models can bring.

The global dance of clouds and winds in the global storm resolving model ICON- nextGEMS Cycle 1 coupled run at 5 km resolution. Credits Felicia Brisc, CEN/UHH.

Temperature over Europe for 2.5 months as simulated by ECMWF model IFS with 4km spatial resolution – nextGEMS cycle 2. Credits Nikolay Koldunov, AWI.

Integration

Towards an integrated Earth system and impact sectors modelling framework

Reliable information for impact sectors

By using unprecedented resolutions globally, the storm and eddy resolving models underpinning DestinE’s Digital Twins will enable the provision of accurate information on the local scale, where the impacts of climate change and extreme events are felt.

It is essential to provide accurate information at these local scales not only for meteorological variables, but also for impact sectors such as agriculture, forestry, energy, air quality and water resources.

Understanding how wind energy will fluctuate at a certain location in the context of an approaching storm, or looking into the levels of the discharge of a certain river for the next 30 years, is extremely valuable for the planning of renewable energies or water resource management.