GPU giant NVIDIA recently revealed Earth-2, a cloud platform designed to simulate and visualize global weather and climate patterns. 

Integrated within NVIDIA’s CUDA-X microservices, the digital twin introduces new cloud APIs on the DGX Cloud platform. These APIs empower users to leverage AI-driven simulations, offering high-resolution visualizations covering various weather phenomena, from global atmospheric conditions to localized weather patterns like typhoons and turbulence.

By harnessing proprietary data from the US$20 billion climate tech industry, Earth-2 enables rapid delivery of updated forecasts and warnings, significantly reducing the time required compared to traditional CPU-driven models.

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Generative AI for climate 

Earth-2’s APIs incorporate advanced AI models, including NVIDIA’s CorrDiff, a generative AI model employing state-of-the-art diffusion modeling techniques. CorrDiff generates high-resolution images, surpassing current numerical models by 12.5 times while operating faster and more energy-efficiently.

This rectifies forecast inaccuracies and provides critical metrics essential for decision-making. It enhances super-resolution capabilities, synthesizing new metrics, and refining fine-scale weather predictions based on high-resolution datasets.

DGX Cloud-Powered compute infrastructure

Earth-2 APIs leverage NVIDIA’s DGX Cloud infrastructure to accelerate climate and weather solutions. This includes optimizing AI pipelines for various models like FourCastNet and Deep Learning Weather Prediction, as well as GPU-accelerated numerical weather prediction models such as ICON. Powered by NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper systems, Earth-2 aims to deliver unprecedented speed and scalability in simulating and visualizing global climate patterns.

Real-world applications 

The Central Weather Administration of Taiwan intends to leverage Earth-2’s diffusion models to enhance typhoon forecasting accuracy, aiding in early evacuation efforts and reducing casualties. 

Additionally, organizations like The Weather Company plan to integrate meteorological data with NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, enabling improved visualization of weather impacts. Early adopters of Earth-2 APIs, including weather analytics platforms and climate tech startups, are poised to enhance forecasting accuracy and develop innovative solutions for climate-related challenges.

This initiative aims to combat the increasing economic losses, estimated at US$140 billion annually, resulting from extreme weather events linked to climate change.