As part of the build-up of Destination Earth, continuous preparatory scientific and technical developments need to be carried out to ensure integration of new digital twins, covering new areas, into the Destination Earth digital twin framework.

The aim is to develop new digital twin infrastructures – these infrastructures should optimally support the scientific and technical performance of the entire digital twin ecosystem of Destination Earth.

The intended integration can be performed at different levels, for example:

• directly integrated in the existing Destination Earth simulation and data fusion system (i.e. full integration mode),
• integrated in a sequential workflow where new digital twins operate their own simulation and data fusion tasks interfacing with the existing Destination Earth digital twins (i.e. coupling mode) or
• as data post-processing applications without own Earth-system component simulation tasks (i.e. post-processing mode).

Proposals should address all the following aspects:

• development of additional and/or improved, advanced, very high-resolution, complex Earth-system model components representing, for example, atmosphere, ocean, land surface, hydrology, cryosphere and biosphere in the Earth-system simulation framework of Destination Earth;
• collecting advanced Earth observation data from satellites, established airborne and ground-based observatories as well as novel technologies (for example drones, buoys, IoT sensors) linked for use in the data fusion framework of Destination Earth for simulation and observation;
• ensure appropriate representation of uncertainty to produce reliable estimates of both monitored and predicted states of the new components;
• development of scientific components of impact models associated with the new topical components for the management of user specific applications in areas such as renewable energy, food, water and health;
• development of software and data handling infrastructures that use and enhance the extreme-scale computing and data handling infrastructure of the Digital Twin Engine of Destination Earth; support and enhance both the workflow management established by the existing Digital Twin Engine and its operation through the DestinE Core Service Platform and the data handling established by the existing Digital Twin Engine and its operation through the DestinE Data Lake.

Legal and financial set-up of the Grant Agreements – The following exceptions apply:
Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional access rights:

Each beneficiary must grant royalty-free access to its results (intellectual property rights), which are needed for further developing, implementing and monitoring the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative, to the entities that are signatories of the Contribution Agreements for implementing the initiative (European Space Agency (ESA), European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT)). Such access rights are limited to non-commercial and non competitive use.