Typhoon Chanthu lashed East Asia in 2021. At one point, winds reached 170 mph, making it one of the strongest storms of the season. It wreaked havoc on the region, triggering evacuations and disrupting travel.
During a storm like Chanthu, meteorologists and government leaders want to figure out what’s coming next. The future of improving such predictions could lie with the technological approach a company might use to anticipate a hiccup in its supply chain: digital twins.
An increasing number of companies and organizations are spending time and money to create digital twins of the Earth. Driven in part by advancements and improvements in technology like computing power and storage — as well as the desire to gain a deeper understanding of data — insight from digital twins could help guide decisions about extreme weather response, urban planning, infrastructure, insurance, and much more.
But much like the physical Earth, its digital twin comes with its share of complexity.
Mirroring Earth before disaster strikes
The reason anyone might want to build a digital twin of the Earth isn’t that different than why a company might build a twin of one of its factories or warehouses.
“It’s really about business process, or business process transformation using technology,” said Alfonso Velosa, analyst at IT consultancy Gartner.
Whether it’s a research institution or a business, building a twin of Earth should ideally have a specific purpose or answer a specific question.
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“We want to be making investments, whether those are on a policy scale or on an infrastructure investment scale, that are really optimized,” said Christine Angelini, an associate professor at the University of Florida’s environmental engineering sciences department.
Angelini, along with a much larger multi-disciplinary team that includes Karla Saldaña Ochoa, director of the Spatial Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Research and Experimentation Lab, are working on a project to create a digital twin of Florida. In these early days of the initiative, which received $1.75 million in strategic funding from the Florida Legislature in 2023, they’re digitizing the city of Jacksonville and focusing on the issues of housing hazards and health.
Similarly, Michael Seablom, head of NASA’s Earth Science and Technology Office (ESTO), talked about his team’s work using digital twins to mirror human-made systems, like power grids or roadways. They want to examine how something like climate change could affect those human systems over time. The underpinning questions ultimately involve Earth science.
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For example, ESTO could create a twin to model the water cycle in an area and show how it’s affected by other Earth systems. A project like that could yield insight into how events like floods and droughts impact infrastructure, as well as people’s lives and property.
In 2022, NASA announced it would support 28 proposals along these lines for two years, for a total of $31 million.
Playing out scenarios that haven’t happened, or could possibly happen, is one of the key use cases for a digital twin.
For researchers, it could answer questions about how wildfires spread and where they’ll burn next, how typhoons or hurricanes might make landfall, or where to place infrastructure.
“If you have a road that you want to build in a coastal area, what is that coastal area going to look like in 20 years?” said Seablom, who is also associate director of technology for NASA’s Earth Science Division.
When digital twins make a world of good
To be sure, digital twins are not new. The lore goes that NASA first conceptualized digital twinning in the 1960s, even if the term itself didn’t come into being until decades later. While experts may quibble on in-and-out bounds of what exactly a digital twin is, the basic idea is that it’s a virtual mirror of an asset, process, person, or the like that’s updated with data that reflects the physical thing. It’s not merely an unchanging representation.
In the past few decades, companies and organizations have created digital twins of factories, warehouses, products, supply chains, and more. The Charles de Gaulle airport in France uses sensors and LiDAR to anonymously track travelers through the airport to address snags and clogs in the passenger experience.
The gaming industry proved to be an inadvertent booster of digital twins. The early 2000s saw a boom in what’s called intelligent environments, mostly applied to game engines, said the University of Florida’s Saldaña Ochoa.
“To create an intelligent environment was to create an environment that is reactive to a user player,” she said. “This has been pushed forward from the game engine companies or from the game developers that made available some software that now is useful for other fields of study.”
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Another contribution from the gaming industry came in the form of more powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs.
“They really changed the nature of gaming and professional simulation and just visualization across the board,” said Rick Brooks, global director of simulation for BlackShark.ai, a company that uses real-time satellite imagery, combined with a generative AI engine it built called Orca Huntr, to create a photo-realistic digital twin of the Earth (Synth3D) that’s been used in a variety of capacities, including Microsoft’s most recent version of Flight Simulator.
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Blackshark.ai’s Orca Huntr technology can create buildings based on what they typically look like in a specific area of the world, including the ones in Paris shown here.
Blackshark.ai
