Esri helps cities gain key climate science insights using geospatial data, AI, Azure

Cities can use the ArcGIS geospatial platform to create environmental digital twins that simulate heavy rainfall and apply hot spot analysis to highlight flooding. These insights help local government and public safety staff better understand potential community impacts.

Esri’s ArcGIS software helps users navigate, adapt to, and mitigate the effects of an increasingly changing climate. Using it alongside Microsoft Azure empowers organizations to model extreme weather scenarios to plan a more resilient environment.

Esri helped the City of Stuttgart reduce its time to conduct key reality mapping from five months to 24 hours through the scale and security controls of cloud infrastructure. Adding Azure AI to the geospatial digital twin will reveal insights in impossible amounts of data.

Environmental Systems Research Institute

In the dynamic fields of urban planning and climate science, Esri, the world’s leading geographic information system (GIS) software provider, is pioneering how cities use data to confront urgent environmental challenges. Esri has more than five decades of experience, and its ArcGIS mapping and analytics software has been instrumental in guiding informed decisions for organizations worldwide. Now, Esri is pushing boundaries, empowering cities to unlock the power of digital twins driven by geospatial data and AI to spearhead innovative climate science solutions.

Esri’s ArcGIS software helps users navigate, adapt to, and mitigate the effects of an increasingly changing climate. Using it alongside Microsoft Azure empowers organizations to model potential extreme weather scenarios to plan a more resilient environment.

For example, Germany is confronting the pressing issue of urban flooding, a problem intensified by the effects of climate change. With heavy rainfall events occurring more often, German cities seek innovative solutions to mitigate the impacts on their communities and infrastructure. Cities can use the ArcGIS geospatial platform to create environmental digital twins that model and simulate heavy rainfall and apply hot spot analysis to highlight areas that would experience greater impacts due to flooding. This new insight helps local governments and public safety organizations understand how added rainfall, water source points, and initial depth interact with the terrain, potentially affecting communities. AI combined with geospatial data, science, and technology, known as geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), offers accelerated problem-solving. This results in predictive analytics that show how barriers could redirect flow and test various mitigation measures, such as placing berms to divert water flow away from buildings. This knowledge is invaluable for long-term planning and for quickly applying resources in emergencies.

Mapping a digital twin

Geospatial data is an essential element of a comprehensive digital twin—a virtual representation of physical entities such as infrastructure, cities, and entire regions. Digital twins provide new ways of interacting and collaborating with physical space through the addition of data and by conducting simulations. By augmenting space with multiple data sources—like municipal, utility, or climate-based data—digital twins model various scenarios to facilitate informed decision-making. For instance, in a flood situation, city planners can use a digital twin to visualize and understand local factors that might intensify damage and to explore preventive measures. GIS provides organizations with advanced data integration, visualization, and spatial and GeoAI analytic capabilities within digital twins, fostering an understanding of complex systems within their geographical context for faster and better-informed decisions.

However, creating a realistic digital twin of a city requires capturing and processing significant volumes of images, and it demands vast amounts of compute power to transform these images into detailed 3D models. Attempting this task through traditional desktop computing is both time-consuming and costly. “If you were to run this on a normal computer, it would take about five months of processing—that’s not feasible,” says Konrad Wenzel, Director of Esri’s Stuttgart R&D Center. “The value of the data is in the moment of capture, to gain a picture of the world as it is today. By taking advantage of the best from computer science and photogrammetry, we can turn a citywide or countrywide dataset into a 3D representation called a 3D mesh. Capturing the entire city of Stuttgart in high resolution required a dataset of close to 22,000 images or roughly 4 million megapixels—that’s a lot of data.”

Using Esri’s ArcGIS software with Azure and NVIDIA Accelerated Computing can drastically lower compute times. Wenzel says, “Our customer used 200 GPU cloud nodes and reduced the time it took to transfer a raw dataset into a complete 3D representation from five months down to a little over 24 hours—that’s a 99% improvement!”

3D location intelligence delivered at scale

Esri’s ArcGIS Pro is the world leading GIS desktop software. Customers can use its reality mapping capability to create accurate digital representations of the world at any scale and extent. This involves converting drone, satellite, and aerial imagery into highly accurate, interactive maps and 3D models. This technology supports reality capture workflows for sites, cities, and countries. Drone, satellite, and aerial imagery is transformed into visually stunning, highly accurate maps and 3D models. As a result, customers can dynamically interact with a digital world that authentically represents places and situations, all enriched with geospatial data for greater context. This data can range from individual assets to community demographics, high-level imagery to underground infrastructure.

Our customer used 200 GPU cloud nodes and reduced the time it took to transfer a raw dataset into a complete 3D representation from five months down to a little over 24 hours—that’s a 99% improvement!

Konrad Wenzel, Director, Esri Stuttgart R&D Center, Esri

Esri’s Reality Engine, the technology behind reality mapping, uses NVIDIA CUDA®-enabled GPUs to accelerate processing. CUDA provides a development environment for creating high-performance, GPU-accelerated applications optimized for the parallel computing capability of NVIDIA GPUs. Esri customers can scale their work in ArcGIS by using Azure Virtual Machines, such as Azure NC-series, Azure D-series, and Azure NV-series, which use multiple NVIDIA GPUs with NVIDIA Virtual GPU technology. Wenzel observes, “With ArcGIS and Azure Virtual Machines, Esri customers can access and operate their digital twins through GPU-powered Azure Virtual Desktop. To deploy these immersive reality mapping experiences based on very large data volumes, cloud processing is ideal for 3D mesh creation in support of complex digital twin initiatives.”

Geospatial digital twins, powered by ArcGIS, deliver accurate representations of complex systems that require robust maps and spatial analytics from GIS technology. These digital twins go beyond 3D models as they reflect change over time—showing historic, current, and future states. From single facilities to large built natural systems, geospatial digital twins scale to meet changing needs.

A continuing collaboration

The strong partnership between Esri, Microsoft, and NVIDIA has led to continued collaboration and integrations to support customers’ evolving needs. ArcGIS customers working with critical infrastructure require stable and secure operations that can support proper data handling and security. By deploying ArcGIS on Azure, customers gain security plus scalability and agility for times of high demand. The explosive growth of collected data and new developments in imagery capture require continuous innovation from strong collaborative partnerships.

ArcGIS offers users a way to create, manage, and disseminate authoritative geospatial digital twins. This allows customers to apply security controls not just to final products but also to each individual layer of data—from an entire mesh to individual streets and buildings to the level of individual images and resolution. Wenzel states, “Project stakeholders want to make sure that data isn’t compromised in the early stages of urban planning, so managing privileges is really key, and having different levels for how to stage or protect the publicity of information is essential.” Esri provides the architecture and security for customers to control the sharing and privileges of data at multiple levels, coupled with Azure infrastructure and processing from NVIDIA, to address customers’ needs for speed, collaboration, and security.

“ArcGIS running on NVIDIA GPUs and Azure infrastructure streamlines a customer’s deployment process—they can deploy quickly, maintain and secure enterprise geospatial data, and orchestrate and scale elastically to analyze really large volumes of data at peak periods.”

ArcGIS running on NVIDIA GPUs and Azure infrastructure streamlines a customer’s deployment process—they can deploy quickly, maintain and secure enterprise geospatial data, and orchestrate and scale elastically to analyze really large volumes of data at peak periods.

Konrad Wenzel, Director, Esri Stuttgart R&D Center, Esri

GeoAI and intelligent digital twins

GeoAI is the application of AI fused with geospatial data, science, and technology to accelerate real-world understanding of business opportunities, environmental impacts, and operational risks. Using GeoAI in ArcGIS, users can extract data from imagery and then perform analyses to identify issues such as infrastructure maintenance needs and the potential population affected by an emergency. Additionally, Esri is helping to drive its user experience with Azure AI, through chat functionality supported by large language models, so users can interact directly with their digital twins. This AI functionality helps users bring together various data-based scenarios, like population and forestry overlays, and pose specific questions about objects over time and across various weather scenarios.

“Digital twins are extremely valuable and ultimately deliver new insights to our customers,” Wenzel states. “Customers may want to know the impacts of invasive species on forest management or how city plans might affect environmental factors like air, temperature, or green space. By leveraging geospatial and AI technologies, a digital twin will be more than just a record of data, it will deliver answers and insights.”

A comprehensive view of risk and strategy

As Wenzel observes, the ultimate power of digital twins lies in collaboration—a collaboration that is driven by the convergence of evolving technologies. Digital twins enable the aggregation of data from every possible domain into a spatial representation to solve real challenges intelligently and innovatively.

Wenzel says, “Esri continues to lead and evolve geospatial technology innovation. Digital twins drive system design that can operate more efficiently by understanding data more closely and by helping mitigate the effects of natural disaster through simulation. With geospatial technology, we can plan better, more sustainable cities. ArcGIS Pro is highly performant with Azure and NVIDIA technologies, delivering solutions that provide unparalleled context with high-resolution data integration for better, more informed decisions.”

With geospatial technology, we can plan better, more sustainable cities. ArcGIS Pro is highly performant with Azure and NVIDIA technologies, delivering solutions that provide unparalleled context with high-resolution data integration for better, more informed decisions.

Konrad Wenzel, Director, Esri Stuttgart R&D Center, Esri

Esri’s geospatial mapping is empowering cities to get ahead of catastrophic weather events with data-driven infrastructure planning. Through efforts like flood simulation, Esri customers have an interactive way of meeting potential hazards of extreme climate events head-on. By enabling real-time simulation, ArcGIS helps customers visualize everything from how water flows at various points over time to how much water accumulates—and where—to changes in infrastructure. Mapping this data allows customers to see how all these factors interact and how adding a dam or new drainage may neutralize risks.

“The ultimate value of digital twins,” Wenzel concludes, “is to help organizations harness data to drive better decisions and smarter planning.”

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