About Us
Digital Twins: From Data to Impact
Project 01Gloria
GLORIA (GLObal digital twin for RegIonal and local climate Adaptation) is a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation/National Research Agency and the European Union ‘NextGenerationEU/PRTR’, running from 2022-2024. The main objective of the project is to develop a digital twin of the Earth’s climate to substantially improve the quality of climate simulations and address the pressing demands for action-oriented, credible climate information in an interactive way.
To achieve this goal, three specific objectives are proposed:
Visit GLORIAThe GLORIA digital twin for regional and local adaptation will change the way in which climate information has been traditionally provided to the climate adaptation community, using a user-centered design, considering user needs, and providing an interactive data flow in an operational manner. To achieve this, key external users participate in user engagement activities around the sectoral applications.
Sectorial applications in GLORIA
Climate and geographic indicators for wine production in Spain
Digital Twin Technology for Climate Change Adaptation
This not only offers the Spanish wine sector the opportunity to have quick access to climate data on the past, present and future, but also the possibility of defining their own climate-related indicators, such as the average maximum temperature in summer, spring frost or SPEI, that can be calculated as the climate model runs. This allows wineries to have regularly updated information on the risks of spring frost, heatwaves and droughts that may affect their vineyards in the long-term future. Additionally, the digital twin offers a unified climate information source for those producers that own farms not only in the Spanish territory but also in other world regions suitable for grape and wine production, like California or South America to name a few.
Project 02Destination Earth
Destination Earth is a flagship programme of the European Commission that aims to construct highly accurate models, or ‘digital twins’, of the Earth to monitor and predict environmental change and human impact in support of sustainable development. The initiative is implemented by ECMWF, ESA and EUMETSAT under the leadership of DG Connect and in collaboration with over 100 institutions throughout Europe. Aligned with the new Digital Europe funding programme, Destination Earth started in 2021, with the first, high-priority digital twins serving extremes prediction and climate change adaptation starting their production in 2023.
The Digital Twin for Climate Change Adaptation, in which BSC plays a crucial role, is a pioneering effort to operationalise the production of global climate projections for the upcoming decades and provide globally consistent Earth system and impact sector information from global to local scales.
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Project 03nextGEMS
nextGEMS (Next Generation Earth Modelling Systems) is a collaborative European project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme to develop two next generation (storm-resolving) Earth-system Models. The project will run from the year 2021 to 2025. Through breakthroughs in simulation realism, these models will allow us to understand and reliably quantify how the climate will change on a global and regional scale, and how the weather, including its extreme events, will look like in the future.
The European Green Deal initiative Destination Earth will rely on projects like nextGEMS to deliver the next-generation, high-resolution Earth-system models to form the core of its digital twins of Earth. This convergence of Horizon Europe funded, cutting-edge research and Digital Europe funded technology capability provision defines a new step in creating value for society.
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Project 04EERIE
EERIE (European eddy-rich Earth system models) is a Horizon Europe project running from 2023 to 2026, with the objective to reveal and quantify the role of ocean mesoscale processes in shaping the climate trajectory over seasonal to centennial time scales. To this end EERIE develops a new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs) that are capable of explicitly representing a crucially important, yet unexplored regime of the Earth system – the ocean mesoscale. Leveraging the latest advances in science and technology, EERIE will substantially improve the ability of such ESMs to faithfully represent the centennial-scale evolution of the global climate, especially its variability, extremes and how tipping points may unfold under the influence of the ocean mesoscale. This will be done harnessing Europe’s pre-exascale computers and considering European ocean mesoscale eddies in preparation for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
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