NVIDIA launches Earth-2 platform to tackle climate change impacts

NVIDIA, has announced a new initiative aiming to mitigate the $140 billion in economic losses that arise from weather-related catastrophes escalated by climate change. The company declared the launch of its Earth-2 climate digital twin cloud platform, part of NVIDIA CUDA-X microservices, to enhance the visualisation and simulation of global and local weather phenomena at a remarkable 2-kilometer scale.

The new cloud APIs will allow users to construct AI-supported emulations that promise the swift creation of interactive, high-resolution simulations. These could range from large-scale atmospheric dynamics to local cloud patterns, and even down to intricate simulations of typhoons and turbulence. When combined with company-owned proprietary data within the $20 billion climate tech industry, the Earth-2 APIs could deliver timely updates and forecasts.

"Climate disaster is now the norm", stated Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. He stressed on the urgency of initiating a preventive strategy against the issue of extreme weather events. He added, "Our Earth-2 cloud APIs aim to help us better prepare for and inspire us to act to moderate extreme weather."

For improved climate tech, Earth-2's APIs avail AI models and a new NVIDIA generative AI model called 'CorrDiff'. The diffusion modelling technology of CorrDiff creates images with resolution an astonishing 12.5 times higher than current numerical models, yet saving time by being 1,000 times quicker and 3,000 times more energy effective. CorrDiff amends the inaccuracies of coarse-resolution forecasts and synthesises metrics necessary for decision-making.

Taiwan's Central Weather Administration (CWA) plans to employ these diffusion models to anticipate more precise sites of typhoon landfall. Chia-Ping Cheng, the administrator of CWA, explained the importance of using Earth-2 in the context of Taiwan being a significant link in the global supply chain. "Flooding risk analysis and evacuation readiness are core to our mandate. With over 136 typhoons hitting the island since 2000, deploying Earth-2 to dilute these impacts is crucial to enhance the quality and resolution of disaster informatics," said Cheng.

Another salient feature of the Earth-2 cloud APIs is NVIDIA's Omniverse, a computing platform that enables creation of Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)-based 3D workflows and applications. The Weather Company, a global pioneer in weather data forecasting, is set to incorporate its meteorological data and Weatherverse tools with Omniverse. When blended, they permit digital twins to thoroughly understand and visualise weather impact. Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company, emphasised, "It's critical to incorporate reliable weather data and insights into digital twin environments to better analyse, plan and simulate weather impacts."

Several companies, including Spire, Meteomatics, Tomorrow.io, north.io and ClimaSens, have already adopted Earth-2 APIs for their weather analytics systems. In combination with additional proprietary data sources and data, these firms will likely enhance their capability to make increasingly accurate predictions.

The Earth-2 APIs utilise DGX Cloud to facilitate full-stack acceleration for weather and climate solutions. As intended, Earth-2 may provide a route to simulate and visualise global climate simulations at an unmatched speed and scale.