Annual Workshop Speaker: Nils Wedi

Destination Earth and digital twins of the earth system
Nils Wedi, Head of Earth System Modelling, The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
ABSTRACT
Funded by the Digital Europe Programme, ESA, Eumetsat and ECMWF will develop Destination Earth: a high precision digital model of the earth to model, monitor and simulate natural phenomena and related human activities. Involving extreme-scale software and HPC with complex workflows, the program aims to implement user interaction using cloud-based technologies and machine learning analysis & impact application modelling.
The first two prototype digital twins are supporting Extreme Hazard Prediction and Climate Risk Assessment. The fusion of domain expertise across different disciplines, facilitating federated data access to and data extraction from very large and diverse datasets, as well as the on-demand orchestration of complex workflows involving pre-exascale EuroHPC computing facilities are some of the challenges discussed in this talk.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nils Wedi obtained his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. His career at ECMWF encapsulates a diverse range of work both technical and scientific. Leading ECMWF’s Earth System Modelling section, he addresses all aspects of scientific and computational performance relating to ECMWF’s forecast model including the quantitative assessment of forecast uncertainty through the ensemble forecasting system.
Within Destination Earth he develops strategies for technological advances to secure the accessibility, portability and scalability of weather & climate models on extreme-scale high-performance computing systems. He is also involved as the scientific coordinator of the European H2020 projects ESCAPE and ESCAPE-2 to address the challenges of rising energy cost for computing towards affordable, exascale high performance simulations of weather and climate. He actively collaborates with researchers worldwide, in particular through his role as a co-chair of the WMO working group on numerical experimentation (WGNE), a key link between weather and climate research.
Nils Wedi at the The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)