Climateprediction.net aims to give a comprehensive forecast of how our weather will change over the next century by running thousands of slightly different predictive models at the same time.
The Open University has used funding from the Natural Environmental Research COUNCIL (NERC) to develop a new modelling tool which can use the support of thousands of people in more than 100 countries to predict the weather. Current climate models predict significant changes to the Earth’s climate as a consequence of global warming but vary wildly in their forecasts – and no model is considered sufficiently robust to inform future planning and investment decisions.
Climateprediction.net will enable the OU and the project’s other lead partners – Oxford University, the CCLRC and the Met Office – to ‘quantify the uncertainty’ of such predictions.
The experiment will simulate the Earth’s climate between 1920 and 2080 using a variety of realistic scenarios for parameters such as human greenhouse gas emissions and the global dimming effects of sulphur aerosols and particulates, not only from industry but also from natural events such as volcanic eruptions.
This technique, known as ensemble forecasting, requires an enormous amount of computing power, far beyond the currently available resources of cutting-edge supercomputers. The only practical solution is to utilise the potential of distributed computing which combines the power of thousands of ordinary computers, wherein each computer tackles one small but key part of the global problem.
The experiment was launched on February 14, 2006 and within 24 hours more than 24,000 participants has signed up so that in the space of a day, the equivalent of two state-of-the-art global climate supercomputers were created through public donation of spare processing time on desktop PCs.
