Climate change and extreme weather events are becoming increasingly prevalent, the need for accurate and efficient weather and climate simulations has never been greater. NVIDIA has recently announced Earth-2, a ground breaking cloud platform that harnesses the power of AI to change the way we simulate and visualise weather and climate.
Earth-2 is a climate digital twin cloud platform that leverages NVIDIA's AI technologies to create high-resolution simulations and visualisations of global climate and weather at an unprecedented scale. The platform enables users to create AI-powered emulations that deliver interactive, high-resolution simulations of various weather and climate phenomena, from global atmospheric conditions to local cloud cover, typhoons, and turbulence.
At the heart of Earth-2 is a new NVIDIA generative AI model called CorrDiff, which employs state-of-the-art diffusion modelling to generate images with a resolution 12.5 times higher than current numerical models, while reportedly being 1,000 times faster and 3,000 times more energy-efficient. CorrDiff is a unique generative AI model that delivers super-resolution, synthesises new metrics of interest to stakeholders, and learns the physics of fine-scale local weather from high-resolution datasets.
By providing more accurate and timely weather and climate simulations, the platform can hopefully help mitigate the economic losses caused by extreme weather events, which currently amount to $140 billion annually.
Early adopters of Earth-2 APIs include weather analytics platform companies like Spire and Meteomatics, as well as start-ups such as Tomorrow.io, north.io, and ClimaSens, which are exploring new solutions for climate tech applications.
One notable example is the Central Weather Administration of Taiwan, which plans to use Earth-2's diffusion models to forecast more precise locations of typhoon landfall. With over 136 typhoons striking the island since 2000, using Earth-2 to mitigate these impacts is crucial for improving the quality and resolution of disaster informatics, according to Taiwan's National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR).
The platform relies on the integration of proprietary data owned by companies in the climate tech industry, which may pose challenges in terms of data sharing and collaboration. Additionally, the computational requirements for running high-resolution simulations at a global scale are immense.
As Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, stated, "Earth-2 cloud APIs strive to help us better prepare for — and inspire us to act to moderate — extreme weather."