12 September 2003
The Met Office's world renowned climate prediction model will
soon be used by internet surfers around the world as part of new
international climate experiment, climateprediction.net.
Launched today (Sept 12) at the London
Science Museum and the
BA Festival of Science in Salford, is an innovative project
which aims to allow computer users anywhere in the world to participate
in climate prediction work.
Climateprediction.net
is a collaboration between the Met Office, the Universities of
Oxford and
Reading, the
Open University,
the CCLRC
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Tessella
Support Services plc. It works by allowing each user to download
their own unique copy of a specially tailored version of the Met
Office's global climate model and run it on their own PC. The
user can see the signal of climate change unfolding in their model
and, when the experiment is completed, the information will be
fed back to the team for analysis.
Mat Collins, Met Office climate scientist, has been working on
the project for almost four years: "This experiment will
give us the most comprehensive assessment of future climate change.
At the Met
Office's Hadley Centre we can only perform a small number
of projections of climate change at any one time. climateprediction.net
will allow us to run many more of these experiments and give better
estimates of uncertainties in climate change to policy makers.
"Those taking part will be contributing to the biggest climate
science project ever. We already have more than a thousand people
world-wide who have signed up. The more participants we get, the
more successful the experiment will be."
Climateprediction.net was the brainchild of Dr Myles Allen at
the University of Oxford. He said: "Thanks to chaos theory
we can't predict which versions of the model will be any good
without running these simulations and there are far too many for
us to run them ourselves. Together, participants results will
give us an overall picture of how much human influence has contributed
to recent climate change and of the range of changes in the future."
More about the
Met Office
More
about the Met Office's Hadley Centre
More
about climateprediction.net
For further information: |
Met Office Press Office +44 (0)1392 886655 |
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Met Office Customer Centre 0870 900 0100 |
If you're outside the UK +44 (0)1392 885680 |
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