Climateprediction.net review

Climateprediction.net is an impressive experiment involving computer users from all around the world, which takes advantage of the spare computing power provided by participants' computers.

It is designed to work in the background whenever users' PCs are switched on.

Its results are being used to produce a forecast of the climate in the second half of the 21st century. By running a model devised by the Hadley Centre - part of the UK Met Office - hundreds of thousands of times with slightly different sets of initial parameters, it can investigate the effect of small variations in, say, carbon dioxide and sulphur emissions. The intention of this project is to enable scientists who are working on this problem to explore how the world's climate may change under a wide range of different scenarios.

The project was launched in 2003. The BBC gave it a massive publicity boost in February 2006, attracting over 30,000 additional computers. At the time of writing its statistics reported that nearly 18 million runs of the model had been completed and that there were almost 165,000 registered users of the program.

Climateprediction uses the same BOINC software, developed by the University of California, as many other distributed computing projects. This program can be downloaded from the BBC Climate Change Experiment website at http://bbc.cpdn.org, as well as from http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/index.php. Another route to obtaining the software is to enrol on the Open University course Modelling the Climate, which provides about 100 hours of study, including exercises that let students explore the way the model works and the results of the version running on their computer.

There are three simulation phases, two of them in the past. The first covers the period 1810-1825. If it performs reasonably well and produces results that are close to historical observations, it continues with the period 1826-1840. The same parameters are then applied to the future phase, from 2050 to 2065.

As you would expect of a general circulation model that takes account of many different parameters, this program is demanding in terms of both hardware specifications and computer time. Running it constantly on a 1.6GHz Pentium PC took almost four weeks, and although many people have run it on notebooks it isn't recommended as they tend to overheat if kept on for such long periods.

So what do you get in return for the use of your computer? First, a sense of participation, especially if you are a member of a group such as the BBC Climate Change Experiment, and the opportunity to join in discussions with other people running the model. You can use your model as a screensaver and watch it progress as a detailed spinning globe, switching between displays of temperature, cloud cover, pressure, rainfall, ocean surface temperature and sulphur emissions. By downloading a free visualisation program, CPView, that has a European view as well as a global one, you can see more detail as the model goes through its phases in 30-minute steps. An advanced visualisation package is available for the Open University course and other groups of students.

The Climate Prediction website has lots of well-presented information about the climatic system and is well worth a visit even if you don't want to get involved in the project.