Destination Earth Data Lake Introduction

The EU Destination Earth initiative

The objective of DestinE is to create a highly accurate replica or Digital Twin of the Earth. This constitutes a new type of information system, with unprecedented levels of detail, quality, and interactivity to support EU-policy makers and users who implement these policies to better respond and adapt to the challenges posed by environmental change.

Several thematic digital twins of the Earth-system are developed over the course of different phases of DestinE. DestinE’s digital twins exploit the latest advances in digital technology, science, artificial intelligence, and the huge opportunities offered by the world-leading supercomputing capacities of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). By combining cutting-edge Earth-system physical and Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) and observations, DestinE’s digital twins accurately simulate natural and human activity and allow to test scenarios that would enable more sustainable development and support European environmental policies.

DestinE thus significantly augments the capabilities in support of the European Commission’s Green Deal, Data strategy and Digital Strategy, complementing existing efforts in this direction from national and European environmental services.

DestinE Core Service Platform

DestinE Core Service Platform (DESP) is a user-friendly platform that provides a large number of users with evidence-based policy and decision-making tools, applications and services, based on an open, flexible, scalable and evolvable secure cloud-based architecture. DESP federates access to users’ platforms, European cloud and HPC infrastructures and integrates access to an increasing number of Digital Twins as they become gradually available via related European Commission and, possibly, national efforts. The platform will employ novel digital technologies for providing data analytics, visualization, and Earth-system monitoring, simulation and prediction capabilities to its users. At the same time, it will allow users to customise the platform, integrate their own data and develop their own applications.

DestinE Data Lake

The DestinE Data Lake (DEDL) provides discovery, access, and big data processing services. The DestinE Data Portfolio evolves according to user needs and follows a defined and evolving process for enhancements, which takes into account required data storage needs. It provides a seamless access to datasets via GUIs or APIs to data, in accordance to the DestinE Data Portfolio, regardless of data type and location.

The DEDL big data processing allows near-data processing and by this conceptually supports ML/AI applications executed on the DEDL. The DestinE data lake federates with existing data holdings as well as with complementary data from diverse sources like in-situ, socio-economic, or data-space data.

In the following pages, you can find details about the Destination Earth Data Lake services.

DestinE Digital Twin Engine

The DestinE Digital Twin Engine (DTE) is a software-defined environment to operate DestinE’s DTs and manage their corresponding control and data flows across distributed HPC and cloud computing resources. It provides a common system approach to a unified orchestration of Earth-system Digital twins. Moreover, it creates a framework for the fusion of observations with Earth-system simulations and the integration of applications targeting specific impact-sectors via selected use cases. The engine enables the porting and optimization of codes, developing and managing the digital twin workflows, and provides the data handling and model interaction and interactivity capabilities that run on diverse HPC and cloud infrastructures including the Data Warehouse hosted on the data bridges.

The DTE concept focuses on interoperability and interactivity and delivers the expected access agility and performance for the digital twins and associated data access.

DestinE Digital Twins

The initial two high-priority DTs on weather induced extremes and climate change adaptation: highly accurate replicas of the Earth-system that simulate the system behaviour at temporal and spatial scales where weather extreme events happen and where the effects of climate change are felt. They combine several cutting-edge Earth-system models and Earth observations as well as advanced data analytics and integration or interoperability with impact sector applications. They allow to monitor and predict environmental change and test scientific hypotheses and adaptation scenarios. A DT is a DestinE system component, interfacing with the Digital Twin Engine, offering a seamless production service of actionable knowledge for users that results from the fusion of observational and simulated data of the physical Earth system and of impact-sector relevant information.

DT on Weather-induced and Geophysical Extremes

DT on Weather-induced and Geophysical Extremes provides capabilities and services to support decision making for rapid response to meteorological, hydrological and air quality extremes. The system combines weather, hydrology and air-quality observation with cutting-edge simulation capabilities. The result is a unified framework, providing high-quality weather and impact-sector information from global to continental and to country and city scales, for the assessment and prediction of environmental extremes, on a timescale of a few days ahead.

There are two components, global and regional. The global component produces simulations on a time scale of 4/5 days ahead, with a spatial resolution of about ~1-4 km. The regional component produces simulations on a timescale of two days ahead, with a spatial resolution of 500-750m. It is configurable (on-demand) for specific triggering and tailoring of the provision of information in terms of geographical region, extreme event type and related impact-sector needs, or what-if scenarios.

As such, the DT represents a substantial breakthrough in terms of provision of integrated earth-system-impact-sector information, spatial resolution and interactivity. In addition to weather-induced extremes, the preparatory work for the inclusion of geophysical extremes (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, geomagnetic storms) will take place.

DT on Climate Change Adaptation

DT on Climate Change Adaptation provides capabilities and services to support planning activities and decision-making linked to climate change adaptation. The system combines cutting-edge Earth-system and impact-sector simulations and observations into a unified framework to provide global high-quality climate projections and impact-sector information on multi-decadal timescales (2020 to ~2050), at a very high spatial resolution (~5km).

Global multi-decadal projections is another important novelty, which allows for providing globally consistent high-quality climate information on a regular basis. The interactivity of the DT will allow to tailor the information streams, including through the possibility to perform what-if scenarios and impact assessments from global to regional and national levels, in support of the elaboration of policies for the Green Deal. This DT thereby also represents a substantial breakthrough in terms of provision of integrated earth-system-impact-sector information, spatial resolution and interactivity.