There are many different ways to make sense of our model and many questions you may have about what's going on in your model. We've tried to provide a brief overview of some aspects of climate, climate modelling and the thinking behind our experiment in the introduction to climate science section.

We're also developing a community space for participants, so that they can discuss various aspects of the experiment, compare their runs, form groups, view their climateprediction.net statistics and generally get involved and have some fun.

This section of the web site tries to explain some crucial features of the Earth's climate. We use the concept of the Earth as a giant heat pump to help explain the large-scale features of climate. This introduction will give you some hints that may be useful when trying to understand what your personal climateprediction.net model is doing.

We also explain that before any prediction it is necessary to calculate a huge number of mathematical equations of various complexity. These equations form complicated climate models, and the model you're likely to work with when participating in the climateprediction.net experiment is a state-of-the-art version developed for calculating climate. Find out more about this in our introduction to climate modelling.

If you want to know a bit more about the scientific goals behind climateprediction.net, then you can either visit this scientific rationale page, or check out our experimental strategy, or, for a deeper look at the need for such a large experiment, have a browse through some of our related publications.

One of the best ways to find out about something is to chat to other people about it. We want participants in climateprediction.net to be able to get together and discuss things about the experiment - anything from extreme climates in a model to looking for materials for a school project. If you want to get involved (and please do) then join in the discussion forum.

We also have customisable participant web pages that give summary details about your run: how many CPU cycles you've given to the project, how many years you've simulated, and so on. You can get together with others and form groups and compete against others. In the near future, you'll be able to see how your run is going against other runs and the experiment as a whole.