Climateprediction.net/PRECIS: Transferring the tools and skills for regional climate prediction.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Oxford Physics
Abstract
Scientists are in agreement that, on average, the Earth's climate will warm by 1.4 to 5.8 K in the 21st century. It is much harder to say how the climate will change in a particular place, and what impacts that change will have on the local water supply, sea level, agriculture and extreme weather events. The best method for making a regional climate forecast, involves using a fine scale regional climate model in conjunction with a coarse scale, global model. However, this process is extremely demanding on computer resources, and can only currently be carried out by a handful of centres, in the developed world. This proposal is to extend the climateprediction.net project, which currently has over 100,000 people around the world running a global model on their home computers. By making this distributed computing facility available to scientists around the world, particularly in the developing world, they will be able to design and carry out climate modelling experiments which will give them unprecedented access to information about how the climate in their local region will change. This will help them inform the government and policymakers responsible for planning for the impacts of climate change in their local region.
Organisations
Publications
Huntingford C
(2014)
Potential influences on the United Kingdom's floods of winter 2013/14
in Nature Climate Change
Massey N
(2014)
weather@home-development and validation of a very large ensemble modelling system for probabilistic event attribution
in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Otto F
(2014)
Attribution analysis of high precipitation events in summer in England and Wales over the last decade
in Climatic Change
Wesselink A
(2014)
Equipped to deal with uncertainty in climate and impacts predictions: lessons from internal peer review
in Climatic Change