CSC supercomputing infrastructure spurs new digital twin simulations on climate

The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) has produced a new set of simulations which represent a significant step forward in producing high-resolution climate information within the European Commission’s Destination Earth flagship initiative. Producing high resolution multi-decadal climate projections requires vast computing power, which is why the CSC-led Climate Digital Twin relies on the EuroHPC supercomputing infrastructure.

Climate change is one of the defining global challenges of our time. New computational tools, known as digital twins, transform scientific knowledge into data that can support informed decision-making on climate change.

The Climate DT is building a comprehensive digital representation of the Earth’s climate system to support decision-making on climate adaptation. The Climate DT is implemented since 2022 by a partnership led by CSC, in close collaboration with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), as part of the European Commission’s Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative. This partnership brings together a broad European network of research institutes, operational meteorological centers, universities, and supercomputing centers.

The Climate DT sets up an operational simulation framework providing globally consistent high-resolution climate and impact-sector information, at spatial scales where many of the impacts of climate change and extreme events are observed. The Climate DT simulations reach a resolution of approximately five kilometers, representing a significant advancement compared with existing global climate simulations which are produced at roughly 100 km.

Such high-resolution simulations are computationally extremely demanding and require vast computing power, enabled by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s supercomputers. The Climate DT utilizes LUMI, located in Kajaani, Finland, and MareNostrum 5, located in Barcelona, Spain, which are some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

First climate simulations with newly defined operational workflows now available

The operational framework set up by the Climate DT allows to both simulate possible future evolutions of the climate system on multi-decadal timescales and assess “what-if” scenarios, supporting climate adaptation efforts across Europe. Impact-sector applications embedded in this framework allow to translate climate data into tailored indicators for climate-sensitive sectors such as water management, renewable energy, and wildfire risk.

A key achievement of the Climate DT in the second Phase 2 of DestinE, which ends in May 2026, is the release of the first set of climate simulations produced with the newly defined operational workflows.

The released data includes:

• global climate simulations describing climate evolution over the period 1990–2049, with the three underpinning climate models
• global storyline simulations that explore how all the weather events, such as storms or floods, that occurred between 2017 and 2025 would evolve under different climate conditions

Alongside the new climate simulations, impact-sector datasets have also been produced and will be released in the coming months.

The data, together with user guidance, has been published on the Destination Earth platform and is available to researchers and experts across both the public and private sectors.

“It is a significant step forward that the first operational climate simulations are now available to researchers and experts. We hope to see strong uptake of the data, supporting data-driven decision-making,” says Jenni Kontkanen, Development Manager at CSC, who coordinates the Climate DT project.

The climate data to wide real-world use

In the third Phase 3 of DestinE, the CSC-led partnership implementing the Climate DT will focus on operating and further evolving the Climate DT system, as well as on supporting users to utilize the Climate DT data in their own applications. The goal is to ensure that Climate DT data is widely used for both decision-making and further understanding how climate and extreme events will evolve.

“The technical foundation is now well established. The next critical step is to ensure that users make full use of the data and understand its potential,” Kontkanen says.

This article was first published on 27 May by CSC.