Earth 2: NVIDIA Unveils AI-powered Earth Climate Digital Twin

Jace Dela Cruz, Tech Times 20 March 2024, 06:03 am

NVIDIA has unveiled its latest venture, Earth-2, an AI-powered Earth climate digital twin designed to revolutionize weather and climate simulation. This initiative aims to address the growing economic losses, estimated at $140 billion, caused by extreme weather events due to climate change.

"Climate disasters are now normal - historic droughts, catastrophic hurricanes and generational floods appear in the news with alarming frequency," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in an official statement.

"Earth-2 cloud APIs strive to help us better prepare for - and inspire us to act to moderate - extreme weather."

How Earth-2 Works

Earth-2, integrated into NVIDIA's CUDA-X microservices ecosystem, introduces cloud-based APIs accessible through NVIDIA DGX Cloud, allowing users to create AI-driven simulations of weather phenomena with remarkable detail and efficiency.

These simulations range from global atmospheric patterns to localized weather conditions such as cloud cover, typhoons, and turbulence.

The introduction of Earth-2's cloud APIs promises a significant advancement in climate modeling by leveraging AI models and a new NVIDIA generative AI model called CorrDiff.

This model boasts impressive capabilities, generating high-resolution images 12.5 times faster than existing numerical models, while consuming 3,000 times less energy.

CorrDiff corrects inaccuracies in coarse-resolution forecasts, synthesizes crucial metrics, and learns fine-scale weather physics from high-resolution datasets.

Taiwan's Central Weather Administration (CWA) is among the organizations set to benefit from Earth-2's diffusion models, utilizing them to enhance typhoon forecasting accuracy.

By leveraging Earth-2's capabilities, the CWA aims to minimize casualties through early evacuations based on precise information, ultimately reducing the death toll from typhoons.

Earth-2's Integration with NVIDIA Omniverse

Earth-2's integration with NVIDIA Omniverse aims to provide a powerful platform for developing 3D workflows and applications based on Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD).

The Weather Company, a leader in weather data forecasting, plans to integrate its meteorological data and tools with Omniverse, allowing customers to visualize the real-time impact of weather conditions within digital twin environments.

Early adopters of Earth-2 APIs include weather analytics platforms such as Spire and Meteomatics, as well as startups like Tomorrow.io, north.io, and ClimaSens.

These companies are leveraging Earth-2's capabilities to enhance climate tech applications and develop innovative solutions for weather forecasting and analysis.

By harnessing the computational power of NVIDIA DGX Cloud, Earth-2 facilitates full-stack acceleration for climate and weather solutions. This includes optimizing AI pipelines for models like FourCastNet and Deep Learning Weather Prediction, as well as GPU acceleration for numerical weather prediction models such as ICON.

"To help effectively address current and future weather- and climate-related challenges, it's critical now more than ever to incorporate reliable, globally scaled real weather data and insights into digital twin environments to better analyze, plan and simulate the impacts of weather," said Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company.

"We've worked with NVIDIA for years on GPU acceleration of GRAF, our proprietary weather modeling systems, and we plan to adopt Earth-2 APIs to create higher resolution, energy-efficient simulations at a lower cost."