A new recording provides an overview of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) of the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative. ECMWF Scientists Sebastian Milinski and Matthias Aengenheyster present the latest developments of the Climate DT and explain its high-resolution climate simulations, their evaluation and how users can access the data.
Watch the full recording:
The Climate DT is implemented by a broad European partnership led by CSC – IT Center for Science, working in close collaboration with ECMWF. Its high-resolution simulations are produced using some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, including LUMI (Finland) and MareNostrum 5 (Spain), provided through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
Following the release of a new set of simulations in May 2026 on the DestinE platform, implemented by ESA, the recording takes viewers through the simulations now available. It also provides examples of how the data can be accessed and evaluated to explore climate change and its impacts. These include two types of simulations: multi-decadal climate simulations running from 1990–2050 and storyline simulations that explore how extreme weather events could play out in past or future climates. These simulations replay the observed global weather events of 2017–2025 in the present, past and future climate.
The presentation also includes insights into how impact-sector models have been integrated directly into the Climate DT workflow. This data, covering hydrology, wildfires, renewable energy, and hydrometeorological extremes, will be released in the coming weeks.
More information:
DestinE Climate DT
Data portfolio in the User Guide
The Climate DT, procured by ECMWF in the framework of Destination Earth is developed through a contract led by CSC-IT Center for Science and includes Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (CNR-ISAC), German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), National Meteorological Service of Germany (DWD), Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Polytechnic University of Turin (POLITO), Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and University of Helsinki (UH), in close collaboration with ECMWF.
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 under the leadership of DG CNECT, by three entrusted entities: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) responsible for the implementation of the two ‘digital twins’, the ‘Digital Twin Engine’ and the AI Earth system model, the European Space Agency (ESA) responsible for implementation the DestinE Platform, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), responsible for the implementation of the ‘Data Lake’.
We acknowledge the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for awarding DestinE strategic access through a EuroHPC Special Access call to the EuroHPC supercomputers LUMI, hosted by CSC (Finland) and the LUMI consortium, Marenostrum5, hosted by BSC (Spain), which were used to produce the Climate DT simulations.
More information about Destination Earth is on the Destination Earth website and the EU Commission website.
