EU generates “digital replicas” of planet Earth to anticipate climate change

The European Comission presented this Monday an advanced system of digital replicas of planet Earth to simulate the effects of the climate change, a kind of technological crystal ball with unprecedented precision thanks to supercomputing and artificial intelligence.

“It is not every day that they let you spy on the future (…). “It has extraordinary potential” and invites you to think that “The future is much bigger than the past.”said the Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Digitalization, Margrethe Vestager, at the presentation of the project “Destiny the Earth.”

The system, located in the LUMI EuroHPC supercomputer data center in the Finnish town of Kajaani, has been developed since 2021 by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Organization European Union for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and more than one hundred public and private partners.

It is housed in the facilities of an old mill, which has made it possible to reduce costs and reduce its environmental impact, and has had a budget of 210 million euros of community funds and in the next two years it will receive another additional 168 million euros to may it continue to grow and improve.

The planet modeling generated by the initiative will provide information for the sectors most affected by climate change and will make it possible to simulate and predict complex phenomena that affect agriculture, forestry, renewable energy or water, with the aim of facilitating investment decisions. adaptation in an increasingly warmer world.

It will be possible to predict, for example, how a storm will affect electricity production or how local infrastructure in cities would have to adapt in a 2 ºC warming scenario.

In this way, it will allow predictions to be refined until 2040 and will continue to advance in subsequent phases, also gaining in precision, since the first two “twins” of the Earth presented this Monday offer an initial resolution of 9 square kilometers that will improve to 4.4 kilometers or even more.

“It allows us to ‘zoom’ from outside to our planet”said Vestager, who called for using this tool to fulfill the promise of keeping the rise in temperatures below 1.5 ºC at the end of the century compared to pre-industrial values.

The project, named in English as Destination Earth and designed for researchers, scientists and policy makers, will allow “explore how the Earth system will evolve under different ‘what if’ scenarios over several decades,” indicated the European Commission.

Everyone can use it, but at different levels. Certain applications are reserved for research centers and public entities as they involve enormous consumption of computing resources.

Brussels hopes that it will serve to improve the design of adaptation strategies to climate change and the most effective mitigation measures.

The system draws on the cream of community technology in supercomputing, data and artificial intelligence, which will make it possible to better predict the socioeconomic impacts of the climate crisis, and also represents a pillar of the European commitment to advanced computing.

“The use of artificial intelligence throughout the initiative, in particular to develop a base model of the Earth system, will allow Destination Earth to become a single supplier on which European industry can test and build new products and services powered by AI”, indicated the European Commission.

Specifically, highly accurate, interactive and dynamic Earth system simulations, informed by rich observational data sets, can be used to anticipate regional impacts of climate change, natural hazards, marine ecosystems or urban spaces.

This will allow “protect biodiversity, manage water, renewable energy or food resources, and mitigate disaster risks in a changing world”, indicates the European Commission.

Destiny Earth can also be used to assess the impact of existing climate policies and legislative measures and improve future decision-making, as well as strengthening Europe’s industrial and technological capabilities.

Together with MareNostrum 5 in Barcelona (Spain) and Leonardo in Bologna (Italy), LUMI is the third operational supercomputer of the five that the EU will soon have in operation, so “Europe has nothing to envy anyone,” Vestager said.