Digital Twins of the Earth System and the Digital Revolution of Earth System Science

Abstract: This talk will outline three revolutions that happened in Earth system modelling in the past decades. The quiet revolution has leveraged better observations and more compute power to allow for constant improvements of prediction quality of the last decades, the digital revolution has enabled us to perform km-scale simulations on modern supercomputers that further increase the quality of our models, and the machine learning revolution has now shown that machine learned weather models are often competitive with conventional weather models for many forecast scores while being easier, smaller and cheaper. This talk will summarize the past developments, explain current challenges and opportunities, and outline how the future of Earth system modelling will look like. It will also explain why we are now talking about Digital Twins of the Earth system and how these twins will help to make Earth system modelling more interactive and flexible.