Predictia is leading the team in charge of developing a climate emulator based on artificial intelligence (AI) for the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative.
Funded by the European Union, DestinE aims to build highly accurate replicas of the Earth system, making use of cutting-edge physics and AI based models, observations, and Europe’s world class supercomputers of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. This will support adaptation strategies and take mitigation measures against the effects of climate change. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is leading the development of the first two high priority digital twins of DestinE on Climate Change Adaptation (Climate DT) and Weather-Induced Extremes (Extremes DT).
Predictia's proposal was selected in the tender published by ECMWF for the development of the climate emulator based on Climate DT data. The team that is led by Predictia includes the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Jülich Research Centre (FZJ, in Germany), and has a long track record in the application of artificial intelligence techniques in the field of climate. In addition, both BSC-CNS and FZJ have at their disposal some of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe and their previous participation in DestinE ensures further integration between the different components.
The emulator that Predictia and its partners are developing will complement DestinE's Climate Digital Twin, whose simulations are mainly based on the laws of physics. The large amounts of high resolution data produced by the Climate Digital Twin will be used to train the climate emulator with the aim to reproduce key aspects of the simulations performed by the Climate twin, such as multi-decadal trends of climate variability phenomena like El Niño, but consuming only a fraction of the computational resources required by the physics-based simulations.
DestinE is an EU-funded initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of building digital replicas of the Earth system by 2030. ECMWF, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) are entrusted by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT) to implement the initiative.
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