The European Space Agency (ESA) is currently developing the Digital Twin Earth, an advanced model that will help scientists better model the future of Earth and eventually solve the problems brought by climate change.
As specified in a Scientific American report a digital replica of Earth could help scientists in dealing with climate change. The ESA is developing the innovative model together with its partners based on data and images captured through Earth-observations satellites and sensors installed on the ground.
To run the digital replica's reliability, this project will necessitate new advanced artificial algorithms and powerful supercomputers, which are presently under development.
ESA and its alliances discussed the project's progress during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26, a two-week event that's presently going on in Glasgow, Scotland.
View of Earth taken during ISS Expedition 42
Antarctica's Digital Model
ESA launched the Digital Twin Earth project in 2020. During the launch, ESA invited researchers and tech firms throughout Europe to present their progress in an event dubbed "PhiWeek."
This planetary mega model's goal is to simulate the impacts of different natural processes and human activities on Earth and model scenarios of evolution.
For instance, scientists might be able to model how the replacement of fossil fuel energy generation in a particular region with renewable power plants is changing the greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere, as well as how that particular shift, in turn, is impacting the rate of rising in sea level.
During the PhiWeek conference, the partners of ESA introduced numerous partial models, smaller-scale "twins" concentrating on different regions of this planet or the Earth's subsystem.
For instance, Antarctica's digital model is currently being developed by a team led by scientists from the Scotland-based University of Edinburgh.
Melting Ice Sheet
In a statement, the scientists said Antarctica holds 60 percent of the entire freshwater of the Earth. If everything that ice melted, global sea levels would rise by massive 190 feet.
The digital twin will help scientists better understand the condition of the ice sheet and examine the thawing process.
According to cryosphere scientist Noel Gourmelen from the University of Edinburgh, by attaching satellite observations, numerical replications, and artificial intelligence, the team has constructed a twin of the "Antarctic ice sheet system, its hydrology, surrounding ocean, biosphere, and atmosphere."
He added, in this project, the team has used the Antarctic twin to track the melt water's whereabouts on and under the ice sheet, not to mention, explore how fringing ice shelves melt under different hydrology occurrences.
Other partial twins concentrated on the Por River Basin's hydrology in northern Italy and modeling droughts in Africa.
Digital Twin Ocean
The Digital Twin Ocean that the National Institute for Ocean Science in France developed is looking at the interplay between the changes in atmosphere and oceans' behavior.
The researchers will utilize this model to investigate the so-called "Arctic amplification," a slightly understood phenomenon that's seeing the northern polar areas warm twice as quickly as the rest of the world.
Moreover, the models are developed to be easily accessible even to users who don't have technical knowledge of the observation of Earth, as well as the climate modeling.
Policymakers should be able to employ these models to envision changes in ecosystems, as well as model consequences of different decisions, explained the researchers.
Related information about the digital twin of Earth is shown on Today's Scientology's YouTube video below:
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