Destination Earth

Context

The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time: rising temperatures, more frequent extreme events and shifting ecosystems are already reshaping how we live, produce and plan. And its effects don’t stay in one place: heatwaves are no longer just isolated weather events, but a source of recurring damage that ripples through agriculture, public health, energy demand and the global economy.

Understanding any one of these phenomena in isolation is no longer enough. Yet, the data needed to see the whole picture is growing exponentially in volume, variety and speed.

In 2022 the European Commission launched Destination Earth (DestinE), an ambitious initiative to build a Digital Twin of the Earth: a highly accurate digital replica capable of predicting extreme weather, analysing climate-adaptation scenarios, assessing socioeconomic impacts and testing mitigation policies.

In this scenario, making Earth Observation and climate data easily accessible and usable is the catalyst that turns a Digital Twin from a raw scientific asset into an actionable decision-making tool.

DestinE Platform: driving impact and innovation

The DestinE Platform (DESP) is the entry point to DestinE: this centralised hub brings together the highly accurate digital twins of the Earth-system developed by ECMWF and the comprehensive data from ESA, EUMETSAT, Copernicus, and all federated data sources hosted in the DestinE Data Lake. On top of this foundation, the platform offers a variety of services and applications designed to leverage these core assets, fostering evidence-based decision-making and accelerating scientific research for the global community.

These services cover the full journey a user takes with environmental intelligence, from initial data discovery and access to processing, visualisation, and understanding.

MEEO’s role

MEEO has contributed to various services sitting at opposite ends of that user journey: EDEN, the gateway to discover and access Digital Twin data, and VISION, the application that turns it into immersive, understandable visualisations.

EDEN

Discover and access the Earth’s Digital Twin

Developed and operated by MEEO, EDEN allows users to discover, visualise, and access Destination Earth datasets. MEEO’s work covers the entire chain required to transform distributed, heterogeneous data into into immediately usable assets.

EDEN streamlines data discovery and access heterogeneous datasets, ranging from satellite observations and atmospheric indicators to Digital Twins, climate reanalysis and projections. These are federated through the service’s RESTful Harmonised Access API architecture. To serve both developer and non-technical communities, the service provides three complementary modes of access:

• Native remote access: direct programmatic access to native data stored across remote sources, including the DestinE Data Lake and Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem.

• Cloud-optimised streaming: on-demand access to a curated selection of Analysis Ready Cloud-Optimised (ARCO) data including Sentinel, ERA5, ERA5 Land, Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) air quality reanalyses and forecast, Climate Adaptation Digital Twin. This data is provided in Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF (COG) format, generated and indexed within a dedicated internal cache optimised for visualization.

• Standard interfaces and catalogues: access through standard interfaces and specifications, such as the APIs Swagger page, OpenSearch, OGC Web Map and Web Coverage Services. These protocols support the programmatic access and also power the Finder web application, allowing users to explore the data in user-friendly way.

VISION

Immersive 3D access to Digital Twin data

Operated by Exprivia, VISION brings Digital Twin data to life through immersive visualisation. It is a client-side application connected to a powerful backend on the DestinE Platform that uses advanced 3D rendering to provide on-demand access to the Digital Twin data produced by ECMWF. Spanning platforms from PC and Mac to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality devices, VISION offers 2D, 3D, and 4D representations to suit diverse analytical needs.

MEEO has delivered the data backbone that feeds the immersive frontend: in practice, prepares and serves the Digital Twin and climate data in the visualisation-ready formats required by VISION’s 3D engine to stream and display complex planetary models on demand.

A growing constellation of services

While MEEO’s core operations have focused initially on EDEN and VISION, our involvement within DestinE continues to expand. We are proud to highlight two additional initiatives which have been onboarded on DestinE Platform: