The past seven years are recorded to be the seven warmest on record. The emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of average warming since the period 1850-1900. What we’re experiencing is very different from the global average. We experience extreme weather where climate disasters became the new normal.
We need to confront climate change as soon as possible, so that we won’t feel the impact of our efforts for decades. It’s not really easy to mobilize action for something so far in the future. To make our future a reality, simulation is the answer. To develop the best strategies, we need climate models that can predict the climate in different regions of the globe unlike predicting the weather.
Climate simulations are configured today at 10- to 100-kilometer resolutions. But greater resolution is needed to model changes in the global water cycle — water movement from the ocean, sea ice, land surface and groundwater through the atmosphere and clouds. Changes in this system lead to intensifying storms and droughts.
Meter-scale resolution is needed to simulate clouds that reflect sunlight back to space. Scientists estimate that these resolutions will demand millions to billions of times more computing power than what’s currently available. It would take decades to achieve that through the ordinary course of computing advances, which accelerate 10x every five years.
In relation, a new technology was proposed that does ultra-high-resolution climate modeling, to jump to lightspeed and predict changes in regional extreme weather decades out.
According to NVIDIA his can be achieved with the help of million-x speedups by combining three technologies: GPU-accelerated computing; deep learning and breakthroughs in physics-informed neural networks; and AI supercomputers, along with vast quantities of observed and model data to learn from.
With the help of super-resolution techniques, they may have within their grasp the billion-x leap needed to do ultra-high-resolution climate modeling. In that way many countries, cities and towns can get early warnings to adapt and make infrastructures more resilient.
NVIDIA plans are to build the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to predicting climate change, named Earth-2, or E-2. This system would create a digital twin of Earth in Omniverse.
The system would be the climate change counterpart to Cambridge-1, the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer for healthcare research.
Credits: NVIDIA
