Our adorable little blue home planet is about to get its digital twin. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) are collaborating with each other to foster this project. Their programmers and climate scientists will put in all their hard work to carefully nurture and create this comprehensive twin of our planet.
It's not only just a super exciting endeavor but also a highly ambitious project for the scientists, who aim to get the result within the next decade. Let's just say this detailed digitized twin model of Earth is being developed with the aim to offer mock tests of various plans before their actual attempt out there in the real world. The result of the simulations in the digitized twin will help everyone comprehend the problems more closely and rectify the probable errors in order to make a better and through plan, keeping in mind the upcoming extreme climate events and challenges.
Digital Revolution
ETH Zurich and the Swiss national Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) is where all the real action is taking place. All the programming and computing works are being base out of there. Europe is committed to carbon neutrality by 2050 and this project may just lead it there.
This entire project requires and shall use every present possible data on climate change, its crisis and also, most importantly, human activities. This smaller but very real digital version of our planet seems to be like a souped-up and evolved version of Google earth; which would help the scientists and other specialists of the genre to gauge the probable outcomes of weather events as well as human structures. For example, whether a program to buoy sinking parts of Venice will withstand more rapidly rising waters or whether or not a levee will hold during a severe storm.
ETH Zurich, in a statement, expressed that, "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." It would also include far-reaching climate data and a model, which can profoundly amalgamate computer science and climate studies.
Just Like The Physical Planet Itself, Its Cute, Little Digitized Twin Is Here To Serve A Lot Of Purposes For The Human Kind.
It will save some unnecessary heavy expenses on projects having extravagant design errors and poor chances of practical success. A climate mitigation strategy, tested and tuned on the 'Earth's twin', shall save a lot of time, energy and resources. At this crucial present, saving some of them shall mean the world and those can be redirected to fight climate crisis that are more aggravating.
ETH Zurich also states that the method of development and maintenance is the very reason as to why climate computers have become an idle tech. The only upgrade these models could get over the years are by only adding more powerful computer processors. The only way of improvement seemed possible was through crunching of numerous data at a high speed that too only in the very detailed and premium models. That was the only way these models could represent more data and that is exactly why it became a never-ending process.
But, Worry No More
The modern high-end computers functioning on complex algorithms are capable of leveraging and crunching gigantic amount of data. The coders and the designers of the digitized Earth twin project shall create their necessary algorithms, bring changes to the hardware to support their vision and use the best of the both worlds in bring the twin into life. This whole process would thus take about a decade to code and be born.
What's A World Without Its Crisis!
Like every ambitious project, it too comes with a glitch. Apparently, the Earth seems to have a space crunch when it comes to place its twin with 20,000 CPUs. The creators are still unsure as to where to keep a self carbon neutral computer system with 20,000 CPUs. Although it has still not been decided but it's likely to be a far-away region in the poles, where all the advantages of natural cooling and renewable energy are readily available. Well, now, let's just wait for the good news.
