Climateprediction.net/PRECIS: Transferring the tools and skills for regional climate prediction.

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.