Scientists Are Building Earth’s Twin To Predit Future Of Climate Change

Scientists are building a highly accurate digital simulation of planet Earth to provide reliable information about extreme weather and climate change.

This “digital twin” will be a virtual representation of as many processes on the planet’s surface as possible including human impact on water, food and energy systems.

In the past, climate and weather predictions have either focused on local regions or larger global systems. The new project, known as Destination Earth, will bring all of this information together alongside human actions to “depict the complex processes of the entire Earth system”.

With our weather becoming more severe, there is a growing need to estimate the impacts of the climate crisis. Almost half a million people have died in natural disasters linked to extreme weather in the last two decades, according to Germanwatch. A UN report recently found that the number of climate-related incidents has dramatically increased since the 1980s.

“The new Earth system model will represent virtually all processes on the Earth’s surface as realistically as possible, including the influence of humans on water, food and energy management, and the processes in the physical Earth system,” ETH Zurich says in a statement. This is in addition to extensive climate data, creating one unified model that also brings together computer science and climate studies.

Like the Pentagon’s rising use of digital engineering in military craft, the “Earth twin” has a goal of saving money on costly design errors for projects that are unlikely to succeed. And with climate change, there’s a secondary reason to use a digital twin: we’re running out of time. A process or climate mitigation strategy that can be tested and tuned on the digital Earth twin can save crucial time and energy in the fight against worsening climate events.

Climate computer models have stagnated because of the way they were developed and maintained, ETH Zurich explains. For years, improving these models has been a matter of simply adding more powerful computer processors. Very detailed models could depict more and more data by crunching that data at a higher speed, and for a long time, this seemed like a never-ending option for improvement.

But now, much more sophisticated models involving complex algorithms can be leveraged with the massive amount of data that computers today can crunch. This is why the Earth twin will take a full decade to code and put into action. The coders and designers will be making hardware changes while building out the algorithms they need, with a goal to use both sides to their best effect.

There’s one last snag in the process: Just where do you put a computer system that will require an estimated 20,000 CPUs? And where are you supposed to put that system if it’s carbon-neutral itself? This could be a remote location in a colder region, where natural cooling and renewable natural energy could both be large benefits. We’ll find out soon.