Climateprediction.net Project

From Unofficial BOINC Wiki

ClimatePrediction.net - http://climateprediction.net/ - Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century.To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

[edit] General

The aim of Climateprediction.net (CPDN) is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models.

(read more about Modelling the Climate). By running the model thousands of times (a 'large Ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

Source: About the Climateprediction.net Project

[edit] More About Climateprediction.net

• Getting started with Climateprediction.net
• Climateprediction.net FAQ
• What's different about Climateprediction.net compared to other projects
• Current versions of Climateprediction.net
• Climateprediction.net Science
  • An Introduction To The Science Behind Climateprediction.net
  • Ensemble
  • Explanation of the Nature Journal - First CPDN Results
  • Cold Equator Models
  • Why doesn't the exact same model work out the same?
• How much resource share should I give to Climateprediction.net?
• Climateprediction.net Size Tables
• In-built Visualisation/Screensaver
• Climateprediction.net Advanced Visualisations
• The Challenge of Volunteer Computing With Lengthy Climate Model Simulations (pdf)
• Problems Running - How-To Test Machine Stability

• If you are really interested in finding out a lot more about Climateprediction.net (CPDN) there are several hours of video from the open day here