The European Union (EU) intends to become climate neutral by 2050, and the set of policies designed to bring about this green transition — the European Green Deal — was announced in December 2019.
For its green transition, the EU plans to fund the development of digital twins of Earth. For these twins to be more than big data atlases, they must create a qualitatively new Earth system simulation and observation capability using a methodological framework responsible for exceptional advances in numerical weather prediction.
This effort is very relevant to WCRP's effort to bring the digital twin concept to the climate science community. The WCRP Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity, which is being co-led by Peter Bauer and Christian Jakob, will work with this and other international efforts to ensure that we enable exploration of past, present and possible futures of the Earth system by adding a new dimension to climate information.
You can find out more about the WCRP effort on the "Lighthouse Activities webpage".
The article written by Peter Bauer, Bjorn Stevens and Wilco Hazeleger is available in "Nature Climate Change" with a limited access.