Weatherathome Project
13 December 2010
Climate change is certainly a huge concern for the scientific community and researchers are always focused on developing scenarios for the near future.

The modeling activity is nonetheless long and demanding and so with this in mind, a project called Climateprediction.net was started in 2003, headed by Oxford University. Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2100 and to test the accuracy of climate models. In order to achieve this, people around the world offer time on their computers to run climate models - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity. This method has successfully been used in the past for other well known projects such as SETI@home or the Clean Energy Project (link: http://www.etcprogram.org/en/news/news/jan-09/clean-energy-project).

Now, however, a new branch of the project is in progress, the Weatherathome project, which aims to delve more deeply on the local weather changes which are likely to occur in specific areas of the globe. For this reason, Climateprediction.net has partnered with the UK Met. Office, with support from Microsoft Research, to develop a regional climate model that is available for downloading and running on personal computers everywhere. The project will focus on only three geographic areas at first, selected for their representativeness; Western US, Southern Africa and Europe.

This means that people from all over the world can join forces and help researchers to better understand the Earth’s climate development by downloading the software from the project website and installing it on their computers. The software will then periodically send back the results to the scientists. Additional information is also available on the website regarding the basics of climate science and on how to interpret the results of the experiments.

For more information and to join the project please visit"
 

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