NVIDIA creates Earth-2 digital twin: generative AI to simulate, visualize weather and climate

NVIDIA isn't just changing up the GPU and AI GPU game with its Blackwell AI GPU chips, announcing Earth-2 today during the GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

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NVIDIA announced its new Earth-2 climate digital twin cloud platform so people could simulate and visualize weather and climate at scales never seen before. Earth-2's new cloud APIs are available on NVIDIA DGX Cloud, allowing virtually anyone to create AI-powered emulations to make interactive, high-resolution simulations ranging from the global atmosphere to localized cloud cover all the way through to typhoons and mega-storms.

The new Earth-2 APIs offer AI models that use new NVIDIA generative AI model technology called CorrDiff, using state-of-the-art diffusion modeling, capable of generating 12.5x higher resolution images than current numerical models that are 1000x faster and 3000x more energy efficient.

Taiwan's Central Weather Administration will use NVIDIA's new Earth-2 to better forecast weather, where they can visualize the exact locations of a typhoon landfall, for example. When a typhoon warning is blasted, the priority is to minimize casualties as much as possible, with early evacuations based on the information generated by various agencies, including Taiwan's National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR).

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said during his GTC 2024 keynote: "Climate disasters are now normal - historic droughts, catastrophic hurricanes and generational floods appear in the news with alarming frequency. Earth-2 cloud APIs strive to help us better prepare for - and inspire us to act to moderate - extreme weather".

Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company, said: "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. 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".