Between the wildfires, heavy pollution, and, well global pandemic, things haven’t been so great here on planet Earth. But, the world we currently inhabit might not be doomed after all.
The European Union (EU) has plans in the works for a digital twin of Earth, Science Magazine reports. This ambitious project will simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land.
Destination Earth will not only forecast floods, droughts, and fires, but also attempt to simulate human behavior to figure out the impact weather and climate change has on society.
The science bases its forecasts off of renders of the planet’s atmosphere in boxes 1 kilometer across. This allows for the data to be more detailed and in real-time than any existing technology of the sort.
Europe’s fear of falling behind China, Japan, and the U.S. in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. The €8 billion investment provided the groundwork for exascale machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second.
These fast calculations allow for Destination Earth to mimic ocean behavior and directly render convection (heat rising that creates clouds). This technology is the first of its kind, as prior models used man-made constructions (satellites, weather stations, etc.) to guide.
Destination Earth’s high resolution will allow for more detailed data to use for weather forecasts, though “the models can’t assimilate measurements that don’t average well or cover broad areas, such as fractures opening up in sea ice,” Science Magazine writes.
Erin Coughlan de Perez, a climate hazard scientist at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, told Science Magazine that modelers today are “moving from just forecasting what weather will be, to what the weather will do.”
The goal is to use real-time data to chart pollution, fires, and other phenomena that affect weather and climate. This would allow policymakers to accurately gauge how climate change will impact society and vice versa.
The project will start next year, and run on one of three European supercomputers that will be deployed in Finland, Italy, and Spain.
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