Geographical Magazine The EU announces plans to build Destination Earth, a digital twin of our planet 2021 Attempts to build a digital twin of the Earth could lead to the democratisation of climate and environmental data
The European Union, as part of a huge investment into digital infrastructure and supercomputing, has announced plans to build a ‘digital twin’ of the Earth. Destination Earth, or DestinE, will pull in an unprecedented amount of real-time data from climate, atmospheric, meteorological and behavioural sensors to construct a high-precision model of the planet.
By rendering the Earth’s atmosphere to a one-kilometre scale, DestinE’s supercomputing capacity will go far beyond today’s modelling infrastructure. Europe’s current climate forecasting model, led by ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) runs at the comparatively coarse scale of nine kilometres. ‘DestinE aims to develop a very high