Your comupter searches Aliens with SETI? Well, from now he can compute more useful data. BBC started a distributed computing experiment. The entry page of the project is easy to understand with a lot of information and everyone is invited to share his personal number crunching facility. Download (<11MB) is available for W2K and WXP.
At the beginnig you’ll download a single unique climate model. Starting from 1920 it will calculate and simulate weather on your private earth model. Current year, temperature, pressure is shown in a nice 3D interface similiar to NASA World Wind. Try zooming or panning to achieve a better view.
Reaching the end at 2080 model is send back to Oxford. Assuming your model has turned earth into an ice planet in 2006 it was a bad one. Models with reasonable outcome will become part of future analysis.
The project page has more background information and an interesting interview with Professor Bob Spicer from the Open University.
The BBC Climate Change Experiment was created using the Met Office climate model. A team at Oxford University runs climateprediction.net, along with colleagues at several other academic and research institutions, including the Open University and the University of California, Berkeley.
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