[A-AS08] Weather, Climate, and Environmental Science Studies using High-Performance Computing

[AAS08-03] Towards the development of a digital twin of weather and climate change

*Masuo Nakano¹, Takuya Kawabata^3,2, Chihiro Kodama¹, Daisuke Matsuoka¹, Tomoki Miyakawa⁴, Takemasa Miyoshi⁵, Hisashi Yashiro⁶ (1.Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, 2.Japan Meteorological Business Support Center, 3.Meteorological Research Institute, 4.Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute / The University of Tokyo , 5.RIKEN R-CCS, 6.National Institute for Environmental Studies)

Keywords:digital twin, global warming

As global warming progresses, weather-related disasters are becoming more severe and frequent. Thus, more sophisticated and rapid decision-making is required for evacuation measures and disaster prevention/mitigation. In addition, for sustainable social and economic development, adaptation and mitigation measures are required not only at the government level, but also at the business and individual levels. Therefore, there is a need to build a digital twin of weather and climate change that can accurately predict today's and tomorrow's weather disasters, as well as the risks associated with seasonal, multi-decadal, and centennial-scale climate change and variability, and use the results at various levels, such as evacuation measures and business management strategies.
The digital twin of weather and climate change consists of data assimilation technology and weather and climate models that reproduce real space in cyberspace, and a data platform that processes the output results and uses them for decision-making. The World Climate Research Program has launched “Digital Earths” as one of its 10-year lighthouse activities through 2028, promoting the development of digital twins that reproduces the Earth system in virtual space. In Europe and the United States, several projects, including the Destination Earth initiative, have been launched to develop global weather and climate digital twins.
Japan suffers from a huge amount of water vapor flux, which often results in heavy precipitation caused by “Senjo-Kosuitai” and is located near the northwestern Pacific Ocean, which has the highest frequency of tropical cyclone formation in the world and has a steep topography. All those lead to the frequent occurrence of weather-related disasters in Japan. Therefore, it is needed to develop not only a global environment but also a higher-resolution digital twin for disaster prevention specifically for the vicinity of Japan.
HPC is essential for the development of such a digital twin. In this talk, the development concept of the weather and climate change digital twin and its challenges will be discussed with a view to the "Fugaku" supercomputer and the HPC environment in the Fugaku NEXT era.