About

Who we are

Climateprediction.net is a volunteer computing, climate modelling project based at the University of Oxford in the Environmental Change Institute, the Oxford e-Research Centre and Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics.

University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute Oxford e-Research Centre Department of Physics

We have a team of 13 climate scientists, computing experts and graduate students working on this project, as well as our partners and collaborators working at other universities, research and non-profit organisations around the world.

What we do

We run climate modelling experiments using the home computers of thousands of volunteers. This allows us to answer important and difficult questions about how climate change is affecting our world now and how it will affect our world in the future.

Climateprediction.net is a not-for-profit project.

Why we need your help

We run hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art climate models, each very slightly different from the others, but still plausibly representing the real world.

This technique, known as ensemble modelling, requires an enormous amount of computing power.

Climate models are large and resource-intensive to run and it is not possible to run the large number of models we need on supercomputers.

Our solution is to appeal to volunteer computing, which combines the power of thousands of ordinary computers, each of which tackles one small part of the larger modelling task.

By using your computers, we can improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

Please join our project and help us model the climate.

Our Experiments

When climateprediction.net first started, we were running very large, global models to answer questions about how climate change will pan out in the 21st century.

In addition, we are now running a number of smaller, regional experiments, under the umbrella of weather@home.

BOINC

Climateprediction.net uses a volunteer computing platform called BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

BOINC was originally developed to support SETI@home, which uses people’s home computers to analyse radio signals, searching for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

BOINC is now used on over 70 projects covering a wide range of scientific areas, including mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics.