by Erica Marchand
Paris, France (SPX) Feb 04, 2026
The EUMETSAT Council has confirmed that the organisation will remain a key contributor to the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative as it enters Phase Three later this year.
Launched in 2022, Destination Earth aims to build highly accurate digital twins of the planet to simulate and predict how natural processes interact with human activities, supporting better-informed decision making across Europe.
The initiative is implemented jointly by EUMETSAT, the European Space Agency and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with ESA responsible for the DestinE Platform, ECMWF for the first two Digital Twins, and EUMETSAT for the development and operation of the DestinE Data Lake.
The DestinE Data Lake forms the data backbone of the system, providing the data layer that underpins the initiative and linking to three EuroHPC Joint Undertaking high performance computing sites where ECMWF runs the digital twins.
Built on a European distributed data infrastructure, the Data Lake enables users to access and process large volumes of information close to where it is produced and stored, improving performance and efficiency for data-intensive applications.
By the end of Phase Two, EUMETSAT and its industrial consortium, led by CloudFerro together with CS-Group and the Earth Observation Data Centre, will have delivered the full operational capabilities and services of the DestinE Data Lake.
This milestone establishes the Data Lake as an operational resource for the overall DestinE system, supporting institutional users and scientific communities that depend on timely, reliable access to environmental data and modelling outputs.
“With the confirmation from the EUMETSAT Council of our continuing participation in Destination Earth, we stand ready to build on our successes from the first two phases and work with our fellow entrusted entities to progress the system’s operational maturity,” said EUMETSAT Director-General Phil Evans.
“The Data Lake is the essential binding layer between the Digital Twins, the DestinE Platform and users, and the infrastructure and services that EUMETSAT has engineered, based on industrial standards, are already operational and placing an enormous wealth of data and computing resources at the fingertips of European institutional users, scientists and analysts,” he added.
EUMETSAT has also deployed a set of capabilities known as Edge Services, which were opened to users in early 2025 and allow processing and analysis to take place close to the data sources within the distributed infrastructure.
Since their release, these Edge Services have attracted more than 50 access requests from a wide range of sectors, including universities, public authorities and small and medium-sized enterprises, reflecting broad interest in exploiting DestinE capabilities.
Operational performance has been strong, with all Data Lake services achieving availability levels above 99 percent, supporting continuous access to data and computing resources for users across Europe.
Looking to Phase Three, EUMETSAT plans to focus on consolidating and maturing Data Lake operations while reassessing future needs and preparing the infrastructure for the next steps in the evolution of Destination Earth.
“The next chapter in the evolution of the DestinE Data Lake will bring about a series of further advances,” said Lothar Wolf, EUMETSAT’s Destination Earth Programme Manager, highlighting three priorities for the new phase.
“After having delivered the full operational capabilities of the Destination Earth Data Lake by the end of Phase Two, the three top priorities for EUMETSAT in Phase Three are the continuation and maturing of Data Lake operations, reassessing and preparing for the future, and focusing on fostering institutional user uptake of DestinE,” he explained.
Planned work also includes incremental enhancements to the Data Lake and its services to better support artificial intelligence activities within DestinE and in the context of emerging European AI factories.
These enhancements are intended to position the infrastructure for further growth in AI-related applications that will be developed under the European Union’s next Multiannual Financial Framework.
EUMETSAT, based in Darmstadt, Germany, operates Europe’s meteorological satellites and provides 30 member states with space-based weather and climate data that support public safety and critical economic sectors.
The organisation’s role in Destination Earth extends its long-standing expertise in big data processing and operational Earth observation services into a new generation of digital environment infrastructure for Europe.
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