An Earth System Digital Twin for Air Quality Analysis

Severe drought and wildfires have become grim indicators of the severity of the weather and climate extremes our planet is increasingly facing. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report describes the unprecedented rate at which the global climate has warmed in the last 200 years (UN News 2021), resulting in increasing ocean temperature, rising sea levels, intensifying rains and floods, new records for heatwaves and droughts, and ever-growing stress on freshwater availability. The growing collections of multi-discipline, high resolution spatiotemporal data requires us to be smarter and more automated, about scalable analytic framework and what data to incorporate into an analysis. This paper presents an open-source Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT) architecture being developed at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for integrated air quality analysis during wildfires.