Western US Drought Results

We will be updating this site regularly over the next few weeks with the results as they come in.

This experiment, studying the drought in the Western US, is looking at:

  1. Temperature
  2. Rainfall
  3. Snowpack

You can see results for each of these for 3 states in the Western US:

Nearly all the models have come back, time for the analysis [August 8, 2015]

It’s been a few weeks, but pretty much all the models have now come back to us, after being run on people’s home computers. As you can see on the plot below, we now have over 13,000 simulations to study, which is fantastic! We’ll keep collecting returned models, though, so please do keep crunching any you have on your computer.

Now we have most of the models back, we can begin the analysis, which will take several months.

Many thanks to all our volunteers for crunching all these models for us, it’s very much appreciated!

All the models have been sent out, about half have come back [July 23, 2015]

So, thanks to your fantastic efforts, all 22,000 models for this experiment have now been taken by volunteers to run on home computers, and nearly half have finished running and have been uploaded back to our servers.

The plots for the results so far have been updated to include all the models that have been returned to us – currently sitting at nearly 8,000 models!

Thanks again to everyone who has helped us with this experiment by running our models on your computer, we couldn’t do this without you.

Climatology Results Available [July 15, 2015]

We now have results for our Climatological simulations, investigating the influence of removing the ‘blob’ of warm sea surface temperatures off the western US coast.

The ‘blob’ has a strong influence on the temperature, for example the climatological simulations without the ‘blob’ are colder than the actual or natural simulations.

In the climatological simulations, it is interesting to see a different response in the precipitation between the different states. This is something our scientists will be investigating in more detail in the upcoming weeks.

Preliminary Results – 607 Models [July 7, 2015]

We sent out the first models to our volunteers last week and so far we’ve had 607 returned to us. Eventually, we will be running over 20,000 models, so we will add these to the plots as they come in.

We still have many simulations ready for people to run, so if you are not running our models already, please consider signing up!

The “climatology” results, that look at the possible effect of the “blob” on the drought, are not ready yet so we’re just showing you the “actual” (world with climate change) and “natural” (world that might have been without climate change) experiments.

For an explanation of the 3 different sets of models we’re running, read the Experimental Setup page.

For an explanation of what these plots are showing, read the Return Time Plots page.

Sample Results [June 26, 2015]

Below is an example plot showing the results from some test simulations.

The results will become available for California, Oregon and Washington as our volunteers return their simulations.

For more information about interpreting these results, see Return Time Plots.

 

– Back to weather@home 2015: Western US Drought