Background to the project

The climateprediction.net project began in 1999, when Myles Allen wrote a commentary article in Nature called Do-it-yourself climate prediction.

By 2000, David Stainforth (Oxford University), the Met Office, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Reading had become actively involved. In 2002, thanks to funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the project grew considerably, and allowed us to entrain expertise from the Open University, KMi and the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (ComLab).

Initially called Casino-21 (a reference both to Monte Carlo simulations and 21st century climate), the project was renamed climateprediction.com in 2001. In 2002 the project name was refined to climateprediction.net to make it plain that we are not a commercial enterprise. In 2003 the project team grew even more, bringing in more computing and climate science expertise. We began alpha testing at the end of 2002, and beta testing in spring 2003. The full public launch took place on 12 September 2003, with overwhelming public interest - 25,000 users worldwide registered on the first weekend!

In June 2004 an extension to the original experiment was launched. Building on the publicitiy surrounding the release of the film 'The Day After Tomorrow' in cinemas worldwide, this new experiment investigated the effects of a thermohaline circulation (THC) slowdown on global climate. The initial results of this experiment can be seen here. At the same time, the website was redesigned, allowing it to be viewed by those using browsers other than Internet Explorer.

On 30 July 2004, climateprediction.net held its first Open Day for anyone involved with the project. To see the presentations given at that Open Day, click here.

On 26 August 2004, climateprediction.net moved to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) developed by the SETI@home project in the U.S.A. This software platform gives participants in the project a lot more flexibility - Mac and Linux users can join in, participants don't have to choose between helping to predict the climate of the 21st century, looking for signs of Extra-Terrestrial life or folding proteins, but can run a combination of distributed computing projects, and our visualisation can be used as a screensaver. Whilst individual participants could still choose to run the experiment in the original way, participation in BOINC really strengthened the project as a whole.

In January 2005, the first results from the experiment appeared in the scientific journal Nature - you can find the article here. Later the same year, another extension to the main experiment was launched, investigating the 'global dimming' effect of changing amounts of sulphur dioxide emissions. Some of the information that has been returned by that experiment can be found here.

In February 2006, climateprediction.net launched its most realistic investigation thus far into projected climate changes in the 21st century. Launched in conjunction with the BBC's "climate change season", this "BBC Climate Change Experiment" simulated the period 1920 to 2080 and used changing future scenarios of greenhouse gas and sulphur emissions that were much more realistic than in the very earliest experiments. In addition, the model used had a fully dynamic ocean - more realistic than the 'slab' ocean used prior to this. You can read more about the experiment strategy here. The experiment was a huge success, attracting around 300,000 new participants.

The BBC Climate Change Experiment posed an interesting problem to the project - how to maintain an infrastructure that was appealing both to distributed computing enthusiasts and to the average BBC viewer. New features were added to the graphical displays of model output and the BBC developed some excellent accompanying web pages. Overall the project succeeded in enabling the participants to view their model output in more depth than previously.

In 2007 work began in collaboration with Kate Ricke and Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University in the USA to develop a geo-engineering experiment. Using the Met Office model used so far, Kate has developed a model set-up to investigate the effect of geo-engineering the climate by using changes in volcanic aerosol to mimic geo-engineering activities. The experiment was released by climateprediction.net in October 2008 and has returned much useful information. The results have been published in a Nature Geoscience (2010) paper that you can find here.

March 2010 saw the launch of an experiment to model the last millennium and, in so doing, to increase our understanding of various sources of data used as 'proxies' to inform us about past climates. As well as telling us more about such 'paleoclimates', such an experiment will enable us to refine even further our selection of models when making our best projections of future climate changes. This "Millennium" experiment, led at climateprediction.net by Dr. Hiro Yamazaki, uses a very fast variant of the Met Office model used up until now - a version called "FAMOUS" which achieves a tenfold increase in speed because of a reduced resolution atmosphere and a lengthened ocean timestep.

In a somewhat newer departure for climateprediction.net, over the last few years work has been underway to develop the use of a regional climate model. Thus far all climateprediction.net experiments have involved global climate models and, whilst these can tell us a lot about climate, they are still not detailed enough to tell us about the potential changes to weather events in specific regions of the world. In collaboration with Met Office colleagues Dr. Richard Jones and Dr. Simon Wilson, the Met Office's PRECIS regional model has been developed for release under the climateprediction.net distributed computing infrastructure. This highly detailed regional model is 'embedded' within a high resolution global atmosphere model (HadAM3P) and initially three target regions will be modelled - the Western US, Southern Africa and Europe. The experiment - called "weatherathome" - was launched on 17 November, 2010, with support from the Guardian, and much interest from the press worldwide. The results are eagerly anticipated.