The Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity is cross-Cutting WCRP Activity supporting development of integrated interactive digital information systems providing global and regional information, including both natural and human systems.
The Digital Earths Lighthouse seeks to advance the co-development of high-resolution Earth-system modeling and the exploitation of billions of observations with digital technologies from the convergence of novel High-Performance Computing (HPC), big data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies. The core of Digital Earths is to develop generic software-hardware solutions that allow simulation models and data assimilation to perform several orders of magnitude more efficiently. It will facilitate the extraction of Earth-system sector-specific information from vast amounts of environmental data, both simulated and observed. The efficiency gains can be invested, for example, in upgrading simulations, ensembles and/or running more comprehensive scenarios. While the digital infrastructure developments will be carried out by institutions outside of WCRP, the role of Digital Earths will be to drive forward innovations that will ensure that the international climate research community is able to take full advantage of these new and exciting technologies.
The Digital Earth’s Lighthouse has 3 main areas of activity:
- Km-scale Modeling: Fully coupled km-scale regional and global models: Foster a global research network in km-scale modeling of the Earth system and individual components (km-scale = ∆x<10km)
- Data-Fusion for Climate: Establish an active community for climate data assimilation and data driven modeling (e.g. Machine Learning/AI methods), expanding on numerical weather prediction and re-analysis
- Beyond the Physical Earth System: Include human interactions on and impacts to human systems in ESMs
Figure 1: The four themes of the Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity.
While the digital infrastructure developments will be carried out through national and international consortia, such as the Destination Earth consortium in Europe, the role of Digital Earths will be to support such initiatives by providing fundamental science and technology developments. This way, it will drive forward innovations that will ensure that the international climate research community is able to take full advantage of these new and exciting technologies.
The preliminary objectives of Digital Earths are to:
- Establish a global research network with expertise in ultra-high-resolution (kilometer-scale or finer) of the global Earth system and its individual components
- Establish an active research community in Data Assimilation (DA) and use of AI for climate that builds on existing Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), re-analysis, DA and weather emulation efforts and significantly expands them to fulfill the needs of Digital Earths applications
- Support the establishment of both global and regional Digital Earths demonstration projects across the globe and provide a collaborative network for their development
- Enable the above by optimally exploiting extreme-scale computing and data handling resources through inter-operable software infrastructures
- Encourage the development of earth system digital information systems that have a human system component and target ‘human’ scales.
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