The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin - delivering global high-quality climate information at scales that matter to society

The DestinE Digital Twin for Climate Change Adaptation (Climate DT) supports adaptation activities through the provision of innovative climate information on multi-decadal timescales, at scales at which the impacts of climate change are observed. This initiative presents the first ever attempt to operationalise the production of global multi-decadal climate projections at km-scale resolutions of 5 to 10km, leveraging the world- leading supercomputing facilities of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking along with some of the leading European climate models. It also enables performing bespoke simulations to assess the impacts of new scenarios or of extreme events in a rapidly warming world and inform adaptation activities.

Simulations

At the moment, model output from two global km-scale models is available and details are listed in the table below.

future projection: to project how climate will change on a global and local scale in the future, forcing changes according to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) 3-7.0 from ScenarioMIP. The SSP3-7.0 scenario explores a future with a continuous increase in CO2 emissions with no strong mitigation efforts. In phase 1, all DestinE simulations follow this scenario. In the future, alternative future scenarios will be explored.

spinup strategy: for coupled climate simulations, it is essential to bring the ocean close to an equilibrated state before launching the coupled simulation. For the scenario simulations, an ocean-only spinup is starting in 2015 from an ocean reanalysis and forced with ERA5 until 2019. This spinup is used to initialise the coupled future projection. The Climate DT will continue to explore and improve spinup strategies in the future.

Data availability

Model output can be retrieved via the polytope service with examples on usage here.

Data is provided on a HEALPIX grid for both models.

Data is provided on various levtype values, for different parameters. See the expandable tree below or the DestinE ClimateDT Parameters page for more information.
The levtype values are as follows:

• hl : Height level field. The key levelist is used to specify the level in metres (e.g. 100). For parameters at height > 10m.
• o2d : 2D ocean field. Note that this can be the ocean surface, or other 2D levels such as at 2 metres or total column integrations.
• o3d : 3D ocean field. The key levelist is used to specify the index of the level. Technical details of these levels can be found here for ICON and here for IFS-NEMO.
• pl : Pressure level field. The key levelist is used to specify the level in hPa (e.g. 1000).
• sfc : 2D atmospheric surface field. Note that this can be the earth surface, or other 2D levels such as at 2 metres or total column integrations
• sol : 3D multi-level model field. This encompasses fields from soil, sea-ice and snow model which use multi-layer schemes. The key levelist is used to specify the index of the level.

For example, retrieve future projection (SSP3-7.0) data, parameters "Surface pressure" (param 134) and "2 metre temperature" (param 167), on 2nd January 2020 at times 0000 to 0600 every hour:

request = {
    'class': 'd1',
    'dataset': 'climate-dt',
    'activity': 'ScenarioMIP',
    'experiment': 'SSP3-7.0',
    'expver': '0001',
    'model': 'IFS-NEMO', 
    'generation': '1',
    'realization': '1',
    'resolution': 'high', 
    'date': '20200102',
    'time': '0000/0100/0200/0300/0400/0500/0600',
    'stream': 'clte',
    'type': 'fc',
    'levtype': 'sfc',
    'param': '134/167'
}

Modifying the request can then be performed based on the following structure of the available data (click the tree to unfold additional sections):