Welcome to Earth-2.
Digital Twin
Chipmaker Nvidia has shown off a clone of our entire planet that could help meteorologists simulate and visualize global weather patterns at an “unprecedented scale,” according to a press release.
The “Earth climate digital twin,” dubbed Earth-2, was designed to help recoup some of the economic losses caused by climate change-driven extreme weather.
Customers can access the digital twin through an API, allowing “virtually any user to create AI-powered emulations to speed delivery of interactive, high-resolution simulations ranging from the global atmosphere and local cloud cover to typhoons and turbulence.”
The company is hoping to help improve early warning systems for natural disasters and improve weather forecasts — and in a matter of seconds, not “minutes or hours in traditional CPU-driven modeling.”
Nvidia claims the new platform is both 1,000 faster at generating predictive images than current models and 3,000 times more energy efficient thanks to a — you guessed it — generative AI model called CorrDiff.
“Climate disasters are now normal — historic droughts, catastrophic hurricanes and generational floods appear in the news with alarming frequency,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. “Earth-2 cloud APIs strive to help us better prepare for — and inspire us to act to moderate — extreme weather.”
Earth-2
Government officials are already planning to make use of Earth-2 to improve their extreme weather modeling. For instance, the Central Weather Administration of Taiwan wants to use the platform to forecast the precise locations of where typhoons will make landfall.
The Weather Company has also committed to using the tool to visualize the impact of weather conditions.
The platform is the latest sign of Nvidia’s ascendancy. Especially with the advent of generative AI tools, the tech world has become ravenous for Nvidia’s graphics cards or GPUs, which not only power those models, but platforms like Earth-2 as well.
By turning its attention to climate change and the disastrous consequences of extreme weather, Nvidia is weaponizing its AI tech for a fight that’s only bound to grow in the near future. The only question? Whether it’ll be accurate in the long term.
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