Computer users simulate extreme weather at home

Science | Environment 17 Nov 10 Volunteers are being asked to run a series of climate prediction experiments on their computers to help understand how global climate change will affect weather in different regions of the world. The weatherathome.net experiment, which is launched today, will build on results from existing climate models to create more detailed simulations of weather changes, initially in three regions: Europe, the Western United States, and Southern Africa. This new experiment, developed by Oxford University and the UK Met Office, and supported by Microsoft Research, uses a 'regional climate model' which provides information on weather events in much finer detail than is typically provided by global climate models. Because of the large amount of computing power required, the regional model covers only a limited area and is supplied with values of weather variables, such as winds, temperature and humidity, around its edges so that it feels the influence of large-scale weather in other parts of the world. 'Regional models add the detail of how different types of weather will change to the background of broad-scale changes provided by global models,' said Richard Jones, Head of Regional Modelling at the Met Office who led the development of the new experiment. 'Watching them run you can see how weather fronts and local features such as mountains interact to produce extreme rainfall.' To take part volunteers download software from weatherathome.net and then run 'two models in one' using the spare capacity from their home computers: a global model, to simulate large-scale weather, and an embedded regional model, to simulate detailed events in a specific part of the world.