Cost of direct air carbon capture to remain higher than hoped

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ETH ZURICH

Switzerland plans to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by no later than 2050. To achieve this, it will need to drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. In its climate strategy, the Swiss government acknowledges that some of these emissions, particularly in agriculture and industry, are difficult or impossible to avoid. Swiss climate policy therefore envisages actively removing 5 million tonnes of CO2 from the air and permanently storing it underground. By way of comparison, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that up to 13 billion tonnes of CO2 will need to be removed from the atmosphere every year from 2050.

These targets will be hard to achieve unless ways can be found to reduce the cost of direct air capture (DAC) technologies. ETH spin-​off Climeworks operates a plant in Iceland that currently captures 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, at a cost per tonne of between 1,000 and 1,300 dollars. But how quickly can these costs come down as deployment increases?

ETH researchers have developed a new method that provides a more accurate estimate of the future cost of various DAC technologies. As the technologies are scaled up, direct air capture will become significantly cheaper – though not as cheap as some stakeholders currently anticipate. Rather than the oft-​cited figure of 100 to 300 US dollars, the researchers suggest the costs are more likely to be between 230 and 540 dollars.

“Just because DAC technologies are available, it certainly doesn’t mean we can relax our efforts to cut carbon emissions. That said, it’s still important to press ahead with the expansion of DAC plants, because we will need these technologies for emissions that are difficult or impossible to avoid,” says Bjarne Steffen, ETH Professor of Climate Finance and Policy. He developed the new method together with Katrin Sievert, a doctoral student in his research group, and ETH Professor Tobias Schmidt.

Three technologies and their costs

The ETH researchers applied their method to three direct air capture technologies. The goal was to compare how the cost of each technology is likely to evolve over time. Their findings suggest that the process developed by Swiss company Climeworks, in which a solid filter with a large surface area traps CO2 particles, could cost between 280 and 580 US dollars per tonne by 2050.

The estimated costs of the other two DAC technologies fall within a similar range. The researchers calculated a price of between 230 and 540 dollars a tonne for the capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using an aqueous solution of potassium hydroxide, a process that has been commercialised, for example, by Canadian company Carbon Engineering. The cost of carbon capture using calcium oxide derived from limestone was estimated at between 230 and 835 dollars. This latter method is offered by US company Heirloom Carbon Technologies, among others.

Focus on components

Estimating how the cost of new technologies will change over time is particularly difficult in situations where very little empirical information is available. This lack of real-​world data represents a challenge for DAC technologies: they haven’t been in use long enough to allow projections to be made as to how their cost might evolve in the future. To address this dilemma, the ETH researchers focused on the individual components of the different DAC systems and estimated their cost one by one. They then asked 30 industry experts to assess the design complexity of each technological component and determine how easy it would be to standardise.

The researchers based their work on certain assumptions: namely, that the cost of less complex components that can be mass-​produced will fall more sharply, while the cost of complex parts that must be tailored to each individual system will fall only slowly. DAC systems also include mature components such as compressors, which cannot feasibly be made much cheaper. Once the researchers had estimated the cost of each individual part, they then added the cost of integrating all the components and the costs of energy and operation.

Despite significant uncertainties in their calculations, the researchers’ message was clear: “At present, it is not possible to predict which of the available technologies will prevail. It is therefore crucial that we continue to pursue all the options,” says Katrin Sievert, lead author of the study, which recently appeared in the journal Joule.

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JOURNAL

Joule

DOI

10.1016/j.joule.2024.02.005 

ARTICLE TITLE

Considering technology characteristics to project future costs of direct air capture

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Mar-2024

 

Exposure to different kinds of music influences how the brain interprets rhythm

A study of people in 15 countries reveals that while everyone favors rhythms with simple integer ratios, biases can vary quite a bit across societies.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When listening to music, the human brain appears to be biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios — for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio).

However, the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a large-scale study led by researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and carried out in 15 countries. The study included 39 groups of participants, many of whom came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive patterns of rhythm not found in Western music.

“Our study provides the clearest evidence yet for some degree of universality in music perception and cognition, in the sense that every single group of participants that was tested exhibits biases for integer ratios. It also provides a glimpse of the variation that can occur across cultures, which can be quite substantial,” says Nori Jacoby, the study’s lead author and a former MIT postdoc, who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

The brain’s bias toward simple integer ratios may have evolved as a natural error-correction system that makes it easier to maintain a consistent body of music, which human societies often use to transmit information.

“When people produce music, they often make small mistakes. Our results are consistent with the idea that our mental representation is somewhat robust to those mistakes, but it is robust in a way that pushes us toward our preexisting ideas of the structures that should be found in music,” says Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

McDermott is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Human Behaviour. The research team also included scientists from more than two dozen institutions around the world.

A global approach

The new study grew out of a smaller analysis that Jacoby and McDermott published in 2017. In that paper, the researchers compared rhythm perception in groups of listeners from the United States and the Tsimane’, an Indigenous society located in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest. 

To measure how people perceive rhythm, the researchers devised a task in which they play a randomly generated series of four beats and then ask the listener to tap back what they heard. The rhythm produced by the listener is then played back to the listener, and they tap it back again. Over several iterations, the tapped sequences became dominated by the listener’s internal biases, also known as priors.

“The initial stimulus pattern is random, but at each iteration the pattern is pushed by the listener’s biases, such that it tends to converge to a particular point in the space of possible rhythms,” McDermott says. “That can give you a picture of what we call the prior, which is the set of internal implicit expectations for rhythms that people have in their heads.”

When the researchers first did this experiment, with American college students as the test subjects, they found that people tended to produce time intervals that are related by simple integer ratios. Furthermore, most of the rhythms they produced, such as those with ratios of 1:1:2 and 2:3:3, are commonly found in Western music. 

The researchers then went to Bolivia and asked members of the Tsimane’ society to perform the same task. They found that Tsimane’ also produced rhythms with simple integer ratios, but their preferred ratios were different and appeared to be consistent with those that have been documented in the few existing records of Tsimane’ music.

“At that point, it provided some evidence that there might be very widespread tendencies to favor these small integer ratios, and that there might be some degree of cross-cultural variation. But because we had just looked at this one other culture, it really wasn’t clear how this was going to look at a broader scale,” Jacoby says.

To try to get that broader picture, the MIT team began seeking collaborators around the world who could help them gather data on a more diverse set of populations. They ended up studying listeners from 39 groups, representing 15 countries on five continents — North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

“This is really the first study of its kind in the sense that we did the same experiment in all these different places, with people who are on the ground in those locations,” McDermott says. “That hasn’t really been done before at anything close to this scale, and it gave us an opportunity to see the degree of variation that might exist around the world.”

Cultural comparisons

Just as they had in their original 2017 study, the researchers found that in every group they tested, people tended to be biased toward simple integer ratios of rhythm. However, not every group showed the same biases. People from North America and Western Europe, who have likely been exposed to the same kinds of music, were more likely to generate rhythms with the same ratios. However, many groups, for example those in Turkey, Mali, Bulgaria, and Botswana showed a bias for other rhythms.

“There are certain cultures where there are particular rhythms that are prominent in their music, and those end up showing up in the mental representation of rhythm,” Jacoby says.

The researchers believe their findings reveal a mechanism that the brain uses to aid in the perception and production of music. 

“When you hear somebody playing something and they have errors in their performance, you’re going to mentally correct for those by mapping them onto where you implicitly think they ought to be,” McDermott says. “If you didn’t have something like this, and you just faithfully represented what you heard, these errors might propagate and make it much harder to maintain a musical system.”

Among the groups that they studied, the researchers took care to include not only college students, who are easy to study in large numbers, but also people living in traditional societies, who are more difficult to reach. Participants from those more traditional groups showed significant differences from college students living in the same countries, and from people who live in those countries but performed the test online.

“What’s very clear from the paper is that if you just look at the results from undergraduate students around the world, you vastly underestimate the diversity that you see otherwise,” Jacoby says. “And the same was true of experiments where we tested groups of people online in Brazil and India, because you’re dealing with people who have internet access and presumably have more exposure to Western music.”

The researchers now hope to run additional studies of different aspects of music perception, taking this global approach.

“If you’re just testing college students around the world or people online, things look a lot more homogenous. I think it’s very important for the field to realize that you actually need to go out into communities and run experiments there, as opposed to taking the low-hanging fruit of running studies with people in a university or on the internet,” McDermott says.

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The research was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council, the South African National Research Foundation, the United States National Science Foundation, the Chilean National Research and Development Agency, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Keio Global Research Institute, the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, and the John Fell Fund.

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

4-Mar-2024

 

Special insecticide paint may help curb zika and dengue fever outbreaks

Scientists showed that insecticide paint could effectively decrease mosquito presence in Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) for up to one year, making this paint a potential strategy to decrease the transmission of vector-borne diseases.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

 

IMAGE: 

VOLUNTEERS WERE TRAINED TO PAINT HOUSES WITH INSECTICIDE PAINT IN TWO PRAIA NEIGHBORHOODS. 

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CREDIT: IMAGE: COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION OFFICE OF THE UNIVERSIDADE JEAN PIAGET OF CABO VERDE

Malaria and other illnesses caused by parasites, viruses, and bacteria transmitted by organisms that spread infectious pathogens account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases worldwide. These vector-borne diseases, typically transmitted by insects like mosquitoes, flies, and ticks, disproportionally affect the poorest populations in tropical and subtropical regions.

In Cabo Verde, an island nation off west Africa, vector-borne disease has been prevalent for centuries, in part due to the island’s geographical location and climate. Now, researchers in Cabo Verde and Spain set out to test the efficacy of three insecticide paint formulations to reinforce the existing national program aiming to minimize the occurrence of disease outbreaks. The results have been published in Frontiers in Tropical Diseases.

“Here we show that VESTA insecticide paint is effective at killing Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito, in the city of Praia for at least one year,” said lead author Dr Lara Ferrero Gómez, who coordinates a research group on tropical diseases at the Jean Piaget University of Cabo Verde. “We also found it has good acceptance in the population, with 98% confirming the decrease in mosquitoes in their residences after paint application.”

Mosquito control for up to a year

In a large-scale field trial, trained volunteers painted 228 houses in two Praia neighborhoods that are particularly vulnerable to diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. This is due to insufficient drainage which leads to flooding in the rainy season and poor wastewater management. Additionally, many residences in Cabo Verde store water due to insufficient and disrupted water supply, and water storage is often unsafe.

After one, three, six, and 12 months, WHO cone bioassays were conducted at two randomly selected houses in each neighborhood. “Bioassays record the mortality of A. aegypti mosquitoes after exposing them for half an hour to the insecticidal paint. This allows us to directly evaluate the effectiveness of the insecticidal paint,” Ferrero Gómez explained.

All three insecticide paint mixtures lead to complete mortality of A. aegypti mosquitoes one month after the houses were painted. Three months after painting, all formulations still exceeded the WHO efficiency threshold, which lies at 80%. At month six, two formulations fell below this threshold. The VESTA formulation, however, also met WHO requirements at months six and 12. “The paint works by releasing very small quantities of insecticide over a long period, which makes it more sustainable and eco-friendlier,” Ferrero Gómez pointed out.

The researchers did not register any serious effects of the paint on residents’ health. Adverse effects reported by few residents included mild eye or nose irritation (10%) and headache (4%).

Malaria free – what’s next?

At the beginning of the year, Cabo Verde was the third country in Africa to be declared free of Malaria by the WHO. The challenge to stop its reoccurrence, however, remains. The researchers said that insecticidal paint is also a promising strategy to strengthen the prevention and control of malaria cases at a household level since insecticide paint is effective for any type of vector disease transmitted by mosquitos, not just zika and dengue fever.

While the researchers face certain limitations, such as the need to meticulously apply the paint in two layers to ensure it does not lose its effectiveness, the TINTAEDES project is expected to extend to more locations across Praia, which is a hotspot for vector-borne diseases, as well as across all of Cabo Verde.

Dr Lara Ferrero Gómez coordinates a research group on tropical diseases at the Jean Piaget University of Cabo Verde. 

CREDIT

Image: Communication and Information Office of the Universidade Jean Piaget of Cabo Verde

JOURNAL

Frontiers in Tropical Diseases

DOI

10.3389/fitd.2024.1321687 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Insecticide paints, a new community strategy for controlling dengue and zika mosquito vectors in Cabo Verde

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

5-Mar-2024

COI STATEMENT

Author IGT is employed by Inesfly Corporation S.L., a manufacturer of vector control products. Authors JCF, LVS and JTR are employed by SITA S.A., the distributor of these products in Cabo Verde. All authors declare no other competing interests.

 

Audit of food donations prompts call for new nutrition and safety standards

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CURTIN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

A LOAD OF DRINKS DONATED TO FOODBANK.

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CREDIT: CURTIN UNIVERSITY

New Curtin University research that analysed a whopping 85,000 kilograms of food donated to Foodbank WA over five days has prompted calls for an overhaul of laws and policies to ensure safe and nutritious food is available for its vulnerable clients. 

Lead author PhD student Sharonna Mossenson from the Curtin School of Population Health said of the 1222 items of surplus or unsalable food donated, 96 per cent met food safety standards, while four per cent were not safe for human consumption and were disposed of by Foodbank WA.

“Nutritionally poor sweet and savoury snacks were the main types of foods donated, and nutritious foods were the least commonly donated, with only six per cent of donated products being dairy foods, eight per cent being meat and 13 per cent being fruit and vegetables,” Ms Mossenson said.

“Supermarkets were responsible for 82 per cent of all sweet and savoury snacks donated and 90 per cent of soft drinks, while the type of food they donated least was fruit and vegetables.

“The Australian food relief sector plays a vital role in helping people experiencing severe food insecurity and given the health vulnerabilities of people accessing their services, these types of donations pose a health risk.

Ms Mossenson said the findings highlighted the need for donors, particularly supermarkets, to take action to improve the quality of food they donate.

“Supermarkets donated the most food overall, half of which was in small mixed loads from local supermarkets, which is a process that needs closer attention as most of the unsafe food (93 per cent) was in these mixed loads,” Ms Mossenson said.

“On average, 49 minutes was spent sorting and inspecting each load for damaged and unsafe products adding a significant burden on Foodbank WA and reducing efficiency in the system.

“While Foodbank WA has extensive processes in place to dispose of unsafe foods, the time it takes for staff and volunteers to unpack and check each donated item is substantial. Introducing explicit regulations requiring food donors to eliminate inappropriate foods before they are donated could free up Foodbank WA staff time so they can focus more on their clients.

“A food safety regulatory framework and fit-for-purpose nutrition guidelines for donated food in Australia are needed to ensure safe and healthy food is donated.”

Foodbank WA Chief Executive Officer Kate O’Hara said Foodbank WA relied on donations of surplus food across the food supply chain including from growers, manufacturers and retailers and the unknown nature of donations created challenges.

“We work closely with all our food donors including supermarkets to ensure quality nutritious food for Western Australians doing it tough,” Ms O’Hara said.

“Since this study in 2022, Foodbank WA continues to monitor its food donations and is taking a proactive approach to sourcing safe and nutritious food such as breads, breakfast cereals, tinned fruit and vegetables, dairy products and meat to support our clients to achieve a balanced diet.

“There are always improvements to be made across the entire food relief sector, particularly to ensure donations are made within a safe timeframe and appropriate refrigerated transportation and storage is utilised.”

The research papers, ‘The Nutritional Quality of Food Donated to a Western Australian food bank’ and ‘Evidence for initiating food safety policy: An assessment of the quality and safety of donated food at an Australian food bank’ were published in the journals Nutrients and Food Policy, respectively.  

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JOURNAL

Nutrients

DOI

10.3390/nu16040509 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The Nutritional Quality of Food Donated to a Western Australian Food Bank

 

A consortium of algae and bacteria boosts the production of green hydrogen and biomass while cleaning water

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CÓRDOBA

 

IMAGE: 

RESEARCHERS WHO CARRIED OUT THE STUDY

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CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CÓRDOBA

A consortium of algae and bacteria boosts the production of green hydrogen and biomass while cleaning water

The mutual relationship between an algae and three bacteria studied by a team at the University of Cordoba presents the highest hydrogen production obtained so far by this type of consortium

Hydrogen is set to become one of the fuels of the future, so researchers are striving to make it as sustainable and green as possible. Hydrogen production using algae and bacteria consortia is a strategy that averts the use of fossil fuels or the electrolysis of water using energy, which are the current ways this fuel is produced. Within this approach, guided by the principles of the Circular Economy, the question is: what is the most effective combination of algae and bacteria?

The BIO128 research group at the University of Córdoba has been looking for these relationships of mutualism where algae and bacteria benefit from their union, resulting in a combination of hydrogen and biomass production while cleaning the wastewater where they grow.

Now they have discovered the relationship between a combination of an algae and three bacteria that, when working together, are able to produce hydrogen and to grow together, producing biomass that can then be recovered and, at the same time, that cleans the wastewater in which they grow. This winning combination is composed of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtiialga model and the three bacteria Microbacterium forte sp. nov., Bacilluscereusand  Stenotrophomonas goyi sp. nov., and the production of hydrogen obtained is the highest reported for any combination of algae and bacteria.

The M. forte bacterium helps the Chlamydomonas alga generate hydrogen. With the inclusion of the other two bacteria in the combination, while hydrogen is generated, both the bacteria and the algae grow, thus producing the biomass, which can then be recovered as a fuel or energy source. "This consortium is better because it is more lasting; you can grow it and obtain hydrogen and biomass for a long time, unlike other consortia," explains researcher David González. "We also discovered that Microbacterium forte and Stenotrophomonas goyi need vitamins (biotin and thiamine) and reduced sources of sulfur to grow, and what Chlamydomonas surely does is provide them with those nutrients that bacteria need to grow." Thus, the bacteria benefit from the relationship with the alga to grow, offering it the CO2 and acetic acid that the alga requires to grow and produce hydrogen.

In this win-win relationship, water and the environment also win. These consortia are grown in wastewater, using that waste to grow and completing water bioremediation tasks. This specific consortium has been tested in synthetic wastewater mimicking lactic residues including, for example, lactose. As another author, Neda Fakhimi, points out, "our approach also harnesses the potential of using waste materials as a source of nutrients, thereby facilitating renewable and sustainable biohydrogen production. With the advantage that this consortium has a hydrogen production approximately ten times greater than that of the previous ones"

The result of accidental contamination in the laboratory

"This consortium came about thanks to a fortuitous contamination of a Chlamydomonas culture in the laboratory, which led to the discovery and sequencing of the genome of two new bacteria: Microbacterium forte and Stenotrophomonas goyi," says researcher Alexandra Dubini, also an author of the work. "We realized that the contaminated culture produced more hydrogen than those that were not, and from there we followed up and saw that there were three bacteria," continues David González.

Therefore, in addition to the progress in the search for biological and sustainable methods to produce green hydrogen, this work also yields the genomes of these two newly discovered bacteria.

References

Fakhimi N, Torres MJ, Fernández E, Galván A, Dubini A, González-Ballester D. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Microbacterium forte sp. nov., a mutualistic association that favors sustainable hydrogen production. Sci Total Environ. 2024 Feb 25;913:169559. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169559

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JOURNAL

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169559 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Microbacterium forte sp. nov., a mutualistic association that favors sustainable hydrogen production

 

New ‘digital twin’ Earth technology could help predict water-based natural disasters before they strike

Scientists demonstrate the use of next-generation satellite data and advanced modeling to build virtual replicas of the terrestrial water cycle that can track water resources and create detailed simulations of flooding and other extreme events

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

 

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DIGITAL TWIN EARTH TECHNOLOGY CAN SIMULATE THE TERRESTRIAL WATER CYCLE

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CREDIT: BROCCA L ET AL/FRONTIERS

The water cycle looks simple in theory — but human impacts, climate change, and complicated geography mean that in practice, floods and droughts remain hard to predict. To model water on Earth, you need incredibly high-resolution data across an immense expanse, and you need modeling sophisticated enough to account for everything from snowcaps on mountains to soil moisture in valleys. Now, scientists funded by the European Space Agency have made a tremendous step forward by building the most detailed models created to date.       

“Simulating the Earth at high resolution is very complex, and so basically the idea is to first focus on a specific target,” said Dr Luca Brocca of the National Research Council of Italy, lead author of the article published in Frontiers in Science. “That’s the idea behind what we have developed — digital twin case studies for the terrestrial water cycle in the Mediterranean Basin. Our goal is to create a system that allows non-experts, including decision-makers and citizens, to run interactive simulations.”   

A test environment for the planet  

In engineering, a digital twin is a virtual model of a physical object which can be tested to destruction without doing real damage. A digital twin of the Earth, constantly updated with new data, would allow us to simulate best and worst-case scenarios, assess risks, and track the development of dangerous conditions before they occur. Such information is vital for sustainable development and protecting vulnerable populations.  

To build their digital twin models, Brocca and his colleagues harnessed extraordinary volumes of satellite data, combining new Earth observation data that measures soil moisture, precipitation, evaporation, river discharge, and snow depth. This newly available data, crucial to the development of the models, includes measurements taken much more frequently across space and time: as often as once a kilometer and once an hour. Like a screen with more pixels, this higher-resolution data creates a more detailed picture. The scientists used this data to develop their modeling, and then integrated the modeling into a cloud-based platform which can be used for simulations and visualizations. This is the ultimate goal: an interactive tool anyone can use to map risks like floods and landslides and manage water resources.   

“This project is a perfect example of the synergy between cutting-edge satellite missions and the scientific community,” said Brocca. “Collaborations like this, coupled with investments in computational infrastructures, will be crucial for managing the effects of climate change and other human impacts.”  

Helping people plan the future  

The scientists began by modeling the Po River valley, then expanded the digital twin to other parts of the Mediterranean basin. Upcoming projects plan to expand to cover all of Europe, and future collaborations will allow the same principles to be applied around the world.   

“The story started with an initiative from the European Space Agency,” said Brocca. “I said we should start from something we know very well. The Po River valley is very complex — we have the Alps, we have snow, which is difficult to simulate, especially in irregular and complex terrain like mountains. Then there is the valley with all the human activities – industry, irrigation. Then we have a river and extreme events — floods, drought. And then we moved to the Mediterranean, which is a good place to investigate extreme events both for too much and too little water.”  

The platform's primary use-case is to enhance flood and landslide prediction and optimize water resource management. To make this work better on a more local level, more granular data and more sophisticated modeling will be needed. For instance, to maximize the potential of a digital twin for agriculture, data resolution should be measured in tens of meters, not hundreds.   

Known unknowns  

Additional challenges persist. These include delays in the transfer of satellite data to the model, the need for more ground observations to validate satellite data, and the increasing complexity of the algorithms needed to handle the data. Furthermore, no model is perfect, and satellite data can contain errors: uncertainties must be properly characterized so that users have an accurate picture of the model’s reliability. According to Brocca, artificial intelligence and machine learning will have a pivotal role in overcoming these challenges, by enhancing data analysis, collection, and processing speed, and streamlining data quality assessment.  

“The collaborative efforts of scientists, space agencies, and decision-makers promise a future where Digital Twin Earths for hydrology provide invaluable insights for sustainable water management and disaster resilience,” Brocca concluded.    

The article is part of the Frontiers in Science multimedia article hub ‘The Digital Twin Earth Hydrology Platform’. The hub features an editorial, viewpoints, and policy outlook from other eminent experts: Prof Ana P. Barros (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA), Prof Christina (Naomi) Tague (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA), Prof Zhongbo Bob Su (University of Twente, Netherlands), Dr Yijian Zeng (University of Twente, Netherlands), and Dr Giriraj Amarnath (International Water Management Institute, Sri Lanka). 

The Digital Twin Earth hydrology platform: toward better water use and disaster prediction

Key milestones for creating a planetary-scale Digital Twin Earth

CREDIT

Brocca L et al/Frontiers

JOURNAL

Frontiers in Science

DOI

10.3389/fsci.2023.1190191 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A Digital Twin of the terrestrial water cycle: a glimpse into the future through high-resolution Earth observations

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

5-Mar-2024

COI STATEMENT

The author SM is employed by Meteorological Environmental Earth Observation s.r.l. The author CB is employed by Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring GmbH. These companies had no involvement in the study and did not provide funding. The funders listed under “Funding” had the following involvement with the study: supervision of the research activities, editing of the manuscript, discussion and interpretation of the results. The Frontiers Editorial Office assisted in the conceptualization, interpretation, and design of the figures in this article. The authors LB, SC, LC, JD, CM, SM, AT, MV, LA, DR, DM declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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