BSC Expertise Leveraged by DestinE Initiative for Next-Gen Climate Prediction Models

May 8, 2024 — The European Union, through its ambitious Destination Earth Initiative (DestinE) under the European Green Deal, aims to create a high-fidelity digital twin of the planet. This project seeks to enhance the capacity to understand and adapt to environmental challenges caused by climate change and extreme weather events.

By June, DestinE plans to complete the first phase, showcasing prototypes for two digital twins: the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) and the Weather-Induced and Geophysical Extremes Digital Twin (Extremes DT). The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has been pivotal in developing the Climate DT.

Led by Francisco Doblas-Reyes, ICREA Professor and director of BSC’s Earth Sciences Department, BSC is a key player in creating the Climate DT. This digital twin will support climate adaptation policies by providing detailed climate impact assessments based on various emission scenarios. These assessments are made possible by state-of-the-art climate simulations at unprecedented resolutions (5 to 10 km), enhancing the accuracy of climate hazard predictions.

This initiative is a collaborative European effort, involving top climate research and supercomputing centers, national meteorological services, and climate impact institutions. Coordinated by Finland’s CSC (IT Center for Science), the partnership works closely with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and other initiatives to develop cutting-edge climate models.

The implementation of the Climate DT includes integrating three advanced global climate models into DestinE’s Digital Twin Engine, which provides the foundational software for these digital replicas. These models are executed on Europe’s most powerful computers, including the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s supercomputer LUMI.

To illustrate the scale of this undertaking, simulating 50 years of climate scenarios on LUMI, which involves 212 nodes, requires 83 continuous days and generates nearly 2,000 TB of data. This wealth of data would have been impossible with previous generations of climate models due to computing power limitations. Furthermore, even if this kind of simulation were possible, it would have taken years to complete.

Phase two of DestinE will also utilize MareNostrum 5, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, providing computational capabilities about 23 times greater than its predecessor.

The development of the Climate DT is a multidisciplinary effort requiring expert input across several fields. BSC plays a crucial role in deploying these models on new supercomputers like LUMI and MareNostrum 5, ensuring efficient operations and managing the vast data produced.

Key BSC researchers, Mario Acosta and Miguel Castrillo, have made significant contributions to this project. Acosta focuses on optimizing the computational performance of the climate models, while Castrillo manages the workflow of the Climate DT using BSC’s Autosubmit tool, ensuring seamless operation across multiple platforms.

Pierre-Antoine Bretonnière, another key member from BSC, oversees data management, facilitating new ways to generate, access, and integrate real-time data.

As DestinE moves into its next phase, BSC will continue to play a vital role, handling one of the global climate models, maintaining the software infrastructure, managing data, and showcasing the practical applications of the Climate DT.