Sept. 12, 2003 — The power of millions of personal home computers around the world is being harnessed to help forecast the climate for the 21st century and improve models of global climate change.

A new experiment in distributed computing called Climateprediction.net will be launched this week in London after being unveiled at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Manchester.

In the experiment, people at home download a unique climate simulation, based on a model developed by the U.K. Met Office, and run it in the background on their personal computer. Each Windows-based version of the model, distributed to home computers, has a different set of parameters and runs for several months before returning data to a central server.

Climate change predictions have to date been plagued by inadequate estimates of their uncertainty, partly because limited computer power has meant that only one or two parameters could be varied at one time. This new system hopes to quantify more exactly the uncertainty of different climate scenarios, by running many more simulations at once than could be done on any single supercomputer.

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