--- id: twins/destination-earth about: depiction: twins/destination-earth.jpg label: Destination Earth description: >- The European Commission's Destination Earth builds digital twins of the Earth system, implemented by ECMWF with ESA and EUMETSAT; two twins so far, one for climate change adaptation and one for weather-induced extremes. tags: - Earth system - Europe - extremes - climate - weather - supercomputing twin: tier: 2 place: Earth scale: planet operational: operational homepage: 'https://destination-earth.eu/' open: source: unknown data: partly api: 'yes' participation: partly domains: - climate relations: - predicate: answers target: questions/weather-and-climate provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: Destination Earth url: 'https://destination-earth.eu/' - title: Digital Twin Engine | Destination Earth url: 'https://destine.ecmwf.int/digital-twin-engine/' - title: Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin | Destination Earth url: >- https://destine.ecmwf.int/climate-change-adaptation-digital-twin-climate-dt/ - title: Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin | Destination Earth url: 'https://destine.ecmwf.int/weather-induced-extremes-digital-twin/' - title: >- DestinE 2025: European collaboration powering Digital Twins and AI | Destination Earth url: >- https://destine.ecmwf.int/news/destine-2025-european-collaboration-powering-digital-twins-and-ai/ - title: DestinE Platform – Your gateway to a sustainable future url: 'https://platform.destine.eu/' - title: Access Policy – DestinE Platform url: 'https://platform.destine.eu/support-pages/access-policy/' - title: Destination Earth moves into its third phase | ECMWF url: >- https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2026/destination-earth-moves-its-third-phase - title: Updates – DestinE Platform url: 'https://platform.destine.eu/updates/' - title: FloodCast – DestinE Platform url: 'https://platform.destine.eu/services/service/floodcast/' reviewed: '2026-10-20' reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed' status: draft --- The twins monitor and simulate natural phenomena, hazards and human activity, and the goal for 2030 is a full digital replica of the Earth.[^1] Destination Earth (DestinE) is funded by the European Union and run under the Commission's DG Connect by three entrusted entities.[^5,8] ECMWF builds the Digital Twin Engine and the first two twins.[^1] ESA runs the service platform that users enter through.[^1] EUMETSAT runs the data lake, which joins the twins' output with Copernicus and other data.[^1] The contribution agreements were signed in 2021 and the launch event was held in 2022.[^1] ECMWF reported on 30 June 2026 that the twins and the engine had been operationalised in phase two.[^8] Phase three runs to June 2028.[^8] The Climate Change Adaptation twin is led by CSC, Finland's IT Center for Science, with ECMWF.[^3] Three climate models, ICON, IFS-FESOM and IFS-NEMO, cover the years 1990 to 2049 with hourly output, at about 5 km for the atmosphere and land and 5 to 10 km for the ocean and sea ice.[^3] Impact applications for wind energy, wildfire, hydrology and extreme rainfall run inside the same workflow.[^3] Storyline runs replay a recorded event, such as the 2024 Central European floods, under past, present and two-degree-warmer climates.[^3,8] The Weather-induced Extremes twin has two parts.[^4] The global part is built on ECMWF's Integrated Forecasting System at 4.4 km.[^4] Each day it starts from the 9 km operational analysis (the best current estimate of the atmosphere, made from observations) and runs four days ahead on the LUMI supercomputer.[^4] The regional part, led by Météo-France on the ACCORD system, zooms to 500 to 750 m over Europe two days ahead.[^4] Flood, air-quality and renewable-energy models are being coupled to the regional part.[^4] ECMWF's December 2025 wrap-up says the global part runs daily and the regional one has been applied to hundreds of European events.[^5] The Digital Twin Engine is ECMWF's software underneath both twins. It deploys them on EuroHPC supercomputers;[^2] the twins' workflows run on LUMI and MareNostrum5.[^5] Their output exceeds a petabyte a day, and the engine's Polytope service lets a user pull out only the slice of data they need.[^5] Machine-learning components for land, ocean, sea ice, waves and hydrology are built with Anemoi, an open-source framework from ECMWF and its member states.[^5] They are built on GPUs at LUMI, MareNostrum5, Leonardo and MeluXina.[^5] ECMWF says phase three will couple them into a European AI Earth-system model and make AI-ready datasets from twin output.[^8] The way in is the DestinE Platform run by ESA.[^1] Registration is free and opens a set of services for data access, processing and visualisation.[^6] The twins' own data need "upgraded access", which public authorities, academia and research, and SMEs and start-ups apply for after registering.[^7] The platform says this access is for European actors and takes several business days to review.[^6,7] Data then comes through Polytope or the Harmonised Data Access API.[^4] For the Extremes twin, Polytope serves native output for the last 15 start dates.[^4] The Climate twin has a user guide and example Jupyter notebooks.[^3] Outside groups can propose a service of their own, which DestinE stakeholders evaluate before it is integrated.[^6] The platform's October 2026 updates add UHEATS, an urban heat pilot service, and HiReNext, a high-resolution forecasting service for transmission system operators.[^6,9] A flood forecasting service for Italy, FloodCast, is in beta testing.[^10]