PC prediction

Climate model for Britain runs on power of joined-up home computers

By 2020 Britain could be about 1.2°C warmer than it was in the 1970s - but by 2080 the difference will have widened to 4°C, with greater rainfall variability causing periods of drought and more flooding.

That’s not the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talking - though the message is strikingly similar. It’s what the UK-based www.climateprediction.net  experiment has come up with, by running a huge variety of climate modelling calculations - on home computers.

The organisers had hoped to sign up 10,000 people to run individual simulations. Special software was developed to do this in ‘background’ mode, whenever one of their machines was switched on but not using all its processing power. The idea caught so much public enthusiasm that 250,000 people downloaded the software, and a fifth of those have already run it for long enough to produce scientifically useful data (which might take three months for the average home user).

The project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, is a joint effort by Oxford University, the BBC and the Open University - where professor Bob Spicer says its communal approach has been its real strength. “We have been able to do calculations that even on a normal supercomputer would have taken decades to complete,” he says. The experiment is ongoing and results will continue to be used by scientists. - Julian Rollins

11 March 2007

Julian Rollins