Earth-2 is designed to help meteorologists improve their modeling of extreme weather events
Microchip maker NVIDIA has unveiled Earth-2, a digital twin of the Earth designed to help meteorologists simulate and visualize global weather at an “unprecedented scale”.
Earth-2 is also designed to reduce the costs of extreme weather events, which are exacerbated by climate change. As part of NVIDIA CUDA-X microservices, Earth-2’s new cloud APIs (application programming interface) on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud enable almost any user to create AI-powered simulations to accelerate the delivery of interactive high-resolution simulations ranging from the global atmosphere and local cloud cover to hurricanes and turbulence, according to the company.
When combined with proprietary data owned by climate technology companies, Earth-2 APIs help users provide warnings and updated forecasts in seconds. The company hopes to help improve natural disaster early warning systems and weather forecasting.
NVIDIA said its new platform is 1,000 times faster at generating predictive images than current models and 3,000 times more energy efficient thanks to a genetic artificial intelligence program called CorrDiff. “Climate disasters are now normal – severe droughts, devastating hurricanes and major floods occur with alarming frequency,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “The Earth-2 cloud APIs strive to help us better prepare for extreme weather events and inspire us to take action to mitigate them,” he added.
Government officials already plan to use Earth-2 to improve modeling of extreme weather events. For example, Taiwan’s Central Meteorological Agency wants to use the platform to predict the exact locations where typhoons will hit.
Earth-2 is NVIDIA’s latest hit. Especially with the advent of genetic artificial intelligence tools, NVIDIA graphics cards (GPUs), which not only power these models, but also platforms like Earth-2 have become skyrocketing.
