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Do-it-yourself climate modelling

Nature (1999)Cite this article

NASA[the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] has a scheme in which you can use your desktop computer as part of a program in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This project now has half a million volunteers whose home computers are crunching through the billions of bytes of data downloaded from radio telescopes. If Myles Allen from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK has his way, another half-million will soon be helping to predict the direction of climatic change.

As he explains in an article in Nature1(14 October 1999), Allen dreams of recruiting an army of home PCs to run different versions of the state-of-the art climate model developed by the UK Meteorological Office. The problem facing the professional climate modellers is that there are hundreds of undetermined parameters in their model. To use the model to predict what the climate will do in the future, they need to first test it exhaustively by running hundreds of thousands of different simulations of the past 50 years of climate, using all the possible combinations of parameters.

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References

  1. Allen,M. Do-it-yourself climate prediction Nature 401, 462 1999.

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Authors
  1. Eleanor Lawrence
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SETI project

Fuzzy-climate modelling

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Lawrence, E. Do-it-yourself climate modelling. Nature (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/news991014-12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/news991014-12

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