Hamburg: Scientists have created a highly detailed digital twin of Earth capable of simulating the planet's weather and climate systems with near-kilometer accuracy, a development researchers say could transform climate modeling.

According to Anadolu Agency, the digital twin was developed by a team led by Daniel Klocke at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany. The model reaches a spatial resolution of 1.25 kilometers, a level many atmospheric scientists have described as a 'holy grail' for climate research.

The innovative model divides the globe into around 336 million land and ocean cells, each paired with a corresponding atmospheric layer. This equates to 672 million points of calculation, allowing scientists to examine changes in both the atmosphere and the planet's surface in unprecedented detail.

The model integrates both 'fast' and 'slow' natural processes. Fast systems include energy and water cycles, which reflect short-term weather events like storms and rainfall. Slow systems encompass the carbon cycle and ocean geochemistry, evolving over years or decades. By linking these systems, researchers can simulate daily weather patterns and long-term climate shifts within the same framework, achieving what was previously thought unattainable.

To run the model, the team utilized the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) model, developed with the German Weather Service, and optimized it through Data-Centric Parallel Programming. This optimization enables efficient processing on modern hardware.

The simulation was executed on two European supercomputers, JUPITER in Germany and Alps in Switzerland. The process used 20,480 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper chips, which combine GPU and CPU capabilities for massive parallel computation. This approach allowed scientists to simulate nearly five months of Earth's climate, equivalent to 145.7 days, in just 24 hours, generating nearly a trillion data points.