On 19 March 2026, ECMWF joined the European Commission’s Apply AI sectoral deep dive webinar on Climate & Environment, organised by DG Connect. The session featured Babis Tsitlakidis (Head of Sector for the EU’s Destination Earth initiative at DG Connect) and Irina Sandu (Director for Destination Earth at ECMWF), who highlighted the rapid progress on applying AI for weather prediction and Earth system modelling.
The Apply AI webinars promote AI adoption across strategic sectors, showcase practical applications and flagship actions like Destination Earth, and explain cross-cutting enablers such as skills, investment and innovation — offering a window into the implementation of the Apply AI Strategy.
A strong European foundation for AI in weather and climate
In the discussion, Irina Sandu underlined Europe’s rapid progress in AI weather prediction, built on decades of operational prediction expertise, the Copernicus Climate Change Service ERA5 dataset — which provides the training corpus for AI weather models — and a history of strong collaboration across Member States. She noted that AIFS is now operational at ECMWF, running side by side with our world-class physical forecasting systems, and that Anemoi, co-developed by ECMWF with its Member States, provides a coordinated software framework for preparing AI-ready datasets, training and operationalising AI models for weather and climate.
“Europe’s strength comes from trusted data, operational expertise and a strong collaborative network. With AIFS, and Anemoi developed with our Member States, we’ve shown that Europe can rapidly build and operationalise advanced AI models and the specialised AI tooling underpinning them — credibly and openly — laying the groundwork for expanding AI capabilities towards a European Earth system model in DestinE.” said Irina Sandu.
DestinE: scaling AI to the Earth system
The webinar then focused on activities implemented within DestinE to scale AI modelling capabilities from weather prediction to Earth system modelling. Running on EuroHPC supercomputers, DestinE’s Climate Change Adaptation and Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twins already produce high-resolution (~5 km), high-frequency, globally consistent information across multiple decades, complementing existing datasets such as ERA5. Using these datasets, ECMWF and partners are developing AI components for land, ocean, sea ice, waves and hydrology — forming the building blocks for a European AI Earth System Model developed within DestinE. These capabilities support applications across agriculture, water management, energy, marine safety and disaster preparedness.
Practical solutions such as Forecast-in-a-Box are also helping to lower the technical barrier for Member States, research institutions, and SMEs to explore and use these AI models.
A European digital ecosystem enabling impact
Babis Tsitlakidis highlighted how EU’s EuroHPC, AI Factories and DestinE — implemented under the lead of DG Connect — form a wider European digital ecosystem that enables the development and scaling of new AI capabilities for climate and environment, in full alignment with the Apply AI Strategy.
“With DestinE, EuroHPC and the emerging AI Factories, Europe is translating its digital strengths into trusted, high-impact AI for climate and environment. This is the Apply AI Strategy in action — focused on resilience, preparedness and competitiveness.” — Babis Tsitlakidis
Responsible, transparent and trustworthy AI
The session also covered DestinE’s work on responsible AI, including practical guidelines and good-practice checklists for ethical and trustworthy development, side-by-side verification of AI models, and clear documentation to support fitness-for-purpose use by public authorities, researchers and SMEs.
Looking ahead
Speakers closed by highlighting rapid progress on AI Earth system components and their coupling, underpinned by AI-ready outputs from DestinE’s Digital Twins and other European datasets, and by the processing power of EuroHPC supercomputers. They stressed Europe’s ability to scale, deploy, and enable the rapid uptake of these capabilities across Member States and sectors.
Watch the talk on the EU Digital YouTube channel.
Destination Earth is a European Union funded initiative launched in 2022, with the aim to build a digital replica of the Earth system by 2030. The initiative is being jointly implemented by three entrusted entities: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) responsible for the creation of the first two ‘digital twins’ and the ‘Digital Twin Engine’, the European Space Agency (ESA) responsible for building the ‘Core Service Platform’, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), responsible for the creation of the ‘Data Lake’.
We acknowledge the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for awarding this project strategic access to the EuroHPC supercomputers LUMI, hosted by CSC (Finland) and the LUMI consortium, Marenostrum5, hosted by BSC (Spain) Leonardo, hosted by Cineca (Italy) and MeluXina, hosted by LuxProvide (Luxembourg) through a EuroHPC Special Access call.
More information about Destination Earth is on the Destination Earth website and the EU Commission website.
For more information about ECMWF’s role visit ecmwf.int/DestinE
For any questions related to the role of ECMWF in Destination Earth, please use the following email links:
