Destination Earth (DestinE) is an ambitious initiative of the European Union to develop a highly accurate digital twin of the Earth system by 2030. Digital twins can be used to monitor, simulate and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities at a new level of detail, quality and interactivity. They will facilitate greater understanding of our changing climate and of associated extreme weather events. DestinE was launched in March 2022, and it entered its second phase in June 2024.

ECMWF is one of three entrusted entities to implement DestinE under the leadership of DG CNECT. Its role is to deliver the digital twins and the Digital Twin Engine. The first two digital twins are the Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin and the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin. ECMWF provides these elements and the Digital Twin Engine together with 90 partners across Europe.

The other two entrusted entities are the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). ESA implements the DestinE Platform, which provides access to applications, tools and services supporting DestinE data exploitation. EUMETSAT provides the Data Lake, which incorporates different data spaces and provides users with harmonised access to the datasets.

The Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin (Extremes DT) enables the prediction of extreme weather events and their impacts two to four days in advance. It includes a global component based on ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) at a grid spacing of 4.4 km to produce four-day forecasts. It also includes a regional component developed by Météo-France and its partners at a grid spacing of 500 to 750 metres. This can produce on-demand regional simulations for two days ahead and refine the representation of extreme events over Europe. Impact-sector elements, for example on water management, agriculture and renewable energy, are integrated into the two components. The Extremes DT aims to support decision-making in response to meteorological, hydrological and air quality extremes.

The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) aims to produce multi-decadal climate projections to support decision-making in support of climate change adaptation. It will provide globally consistent data with higher spatial and temporal resolution than current climate models: a grid spacing of 5 to 10 km globally, with hourly output. The Climate DT represents the first-ever attempt to operationalise the production of global multi-decadal climate projections at such resolutions. It will also provide a framework for bespoke, on-demand climate simulations. These can, for example, be used to assess the impact of certain scenarios. The Climate DT uses three models: the ICON model, and ECMWF’s IFS used with two different ocean models, NEMO and FESOM. It is developed by a partnership led by CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland.

The Digital Twin Engine enables the digital twins to smoothly operate in a physically distributed European supercomputing landscape. It:

• handles data volumes and data production rates that go beyond numerical weather and climate prediction practices today
• adapts to new supercomputer environments
• defines end-to-end workflows to fully deploy the digital twins
• handles and tailors big data streams efficiently
• empowers users to interact with the digital twins, and
• enables machine learning.

An agreement with the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) has granted DestinE special access to some of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe: LUMI based in Finland; Leonardo in Italy; MareNostrum5 in Barcelona; and MeluXina in Luxembourg. This makes it possible to carry out complex digital twin simulations at unprecedented spatial resolutions. Data bridges enable the seamless operation of the system.

The second phase of DestinE will focus on users, consolidation, maintenance, and continuous evolution of the components of the DestinE system. ECMWF and its partner institutions will transition the Climate and Extremes DTs towards operational-level execution. An important aspect of this phase is the growing use of breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). By 2026 DestinE will integrate additional digital twins and related services, and by 2030 a full digital replica of Earth is expected to be available. More details on ECMWF’s involvement in DestinE can be found on our DestinE website.