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 has grown 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 happened on 12th 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 Day After Tomorrow' in cinemas around the world, this new experiment investigated the effects of a thermohaline circulation (THC) slowdown on the World's 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 people using browsers other than Internet Explorer.

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

On August 26th, 2004, climateprediction.net moved to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) developed by the SETI@home project in the U.S.A. The 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 can still choose to run the experiment in the original way, participation in BOINC really strengthens 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 come back from that experiment can be found here.

In February 2006, the main climateprediction.net experiment, to simulate 1920-2080 (you can read more about the experiment strategy here) was launched, in conjunction with the BBC's climate change season. This posed an interesting problem to the project - how to maintain an infrastructure that was appealing both to the distributed computing enthusiasts, and to the average BBC viewer.