Peter Bauer

To manage Earth in the Anthropocene, new tools, new institutions, and new forms of international cooperation will be required. Earth Virtualization Engines is proposed as an international federation of centers of excellence to empower all people to respond to the immense and urgent challenges posed by climate change.

To manage Earth in the Anthropocene, new tools, new institutions, and new forms of international cooperation will be required. Earth Virtualization Engines are proposed as international federation of centers of excellence to empower all people to respond to the immense and urgent challenges posed by climate change.

ECMWF recent improvements on scientific and technological fronts will be presented. In 2021 two new operational upgrades of the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), cycles 47r2 and 47r3, have been introduced. In 2022 the ECMWF High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility has migrated from Reading, UK to a new data centre in Bologna, Italy, and on 18 October 2022 the operational system has been ported to a new supercomputer with enhanced capacity, that will pave the way for an increase in resolution in 2023 with the implementation of IFS cycle 48r1.IFS Cycle 47r2 was first introduced on 11 May 2021 and its key features included changing the vertical resolution of the Ensemble forecast system (ENS) from 91 to 137 levels, the same used in the high-resolution forecast (HRES). This was made possible by introducing single precision arithmetic in both the HRES and ENS forecast systems. The single precision itself is neutral but enabled the ENS change which led to significant forecast skill improvement. Five months later, ECMWF introduced Cycle 47r3 operationally on 12 October 2021. This included major changes to the model physics that had been under development for several years. A more consistent formulation of boundary layer turbulence, new deep convection closure and cloud microphysics changes have increased the realism of the water cycle.The next science upgrade, cycle 48r1, will be implemented in 2023 on our new HPC system in Bologna. This will see an enhancement of the ENS horizontal resolution to the TCo1279 grid (approximately 9km), the same resolution currently used by the HRES. There will also be an increase of the data assimilation resolution used in the incremental 4D-Var minimisation, and the use a new object orientated approach to run the 4D-Var atmospheric data assimilation (OOPS). Other important changes in 48r1 include running a daily 100 members extended range ensembles, introducing a new multi-layer snowpack model, and improving the atmospheric energy and water conservation.Looking further ahead, future higher resolution capabilities will be accelerated by the digital twin developments under the European Commission Destination Earth programme, which will build km-scale capability for a range of potential future HPC architectures. Major efforts have been invested in the code scalability of the Integrated Forecasting System to be able to run on GPUs and investigating alternative dynamical core options. Data assimilation will evolve towards a fully coupled approach to maximise the exploitation of observations and benefit all components of the Earth system (atmosphere, land, ocean) in a consistent way. Machine Learning (ML) will be exploited to enhance the performance and efficiency of our systems. Finally, our Copernicus partnership with the European Commission has just entered its second phase. Synergistic interactions between meteorology and composition will be pursued for the mutual benefit of both and preparatory steps for next ECMWF climate reanalysis, ERA6, and new seasonal forecasting system, SEAS6, have already started. Several major upgrades in ERA6 and SEAS6 will aim at mitigating against systematic model biases to produce climate records with significantly improved time consistency, and enhanced reliability for extended-range predictions.

Destination Earth is the first grand effort to define and deploy digital twins of the Earth system. The European Commission is making this important, multiyear investment to develop this new type of information system, blending the physical and digital worlds. The scale of computational resources and data flows is unprecedented, and so are the challenges and the opportunities. Digital twins of Earth will support decision making faced with weather extremes and climate change adaptation as well as provide to users the means to interact, modify, and create their own tailored information. Building on the latest science and technology advances, this article describes the steps to realize the dream of preparing a more resilient society faced with unprecedented climate change in the decades to come.

The talk describes ongoing efforts to create digital replicas of the Earth as part of the the European Commission's Destination Earth programme.Global, coupled storm-resolving simulations are feasible and can contribute to building such information systems and are no longer a dream thanks to recent advances in Earth system modelling, supercomputing and the adaptation of weather and climate codes for novel computing architectures. Such simulations for example explicitly represent essential climate processes, such as deep convection and mesoscale ocean eddies, that today need to be parametrised even at the highest resolution used in global weather and climate information production. These simulations, combined with novel data-driven deep learning advances, thus offer a window into the future, with a promise to significantly increase the realism of Earth system information. Despite the significant compute and data challenges, there is a real prospect to better support global to local climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, and complement the existing information derived with today's operational simulations in the range of 10-100 km.Digital Twins of Earth thus encapsulate both the latest science as well as technology advances to provide near-real time information on Extremes and climate change in a wider digital environment. Here users can interact, modify and ultimately create their own tailored information. This is facilitated through complex workflows managed by ECMWF's digital twin engine that closely connects EuroHPC resources for the production of digital twin data, manages diverse data access patterns through cloud-based ancilliary systems such as Eumetsat's Data Lake, and provides a diverse range of tools to faciliate user interaction and data-driven applications creating new information through ESA's user service platform. The underlying system architecture and design choices will be described and justified.