There's currently a shortage of space on some of our upload servers and one has suffered a power supply failure. The failed supply will be replaced shortly but there will be a wait whilst new RAID arrays arrive to take the load off the other servers. More information will be posted in the PHP board news thread as we get it.

CPDN extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Keith Shine of Reading University's Meteorology Department on his election as Fellow of the Royal Society. Keith is a leading international authority on atmospheric radiative transfer and his work deals with, among many other things, the energy budget of the climate system and identifying the processes that drive climate change. He is a recognised expert in quantifying the radiative forcing of various climate change mechanisms, together with their associated uncertainties. His election to FRS recognises an outstanding research career in this field. Well done Keith!

SMITH SCHOOL OF ENTERPRISE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Post Doctoral Research Assistant - Climate Modelling

Three year post

Grade 7: Salary £28,839 to £35,469 (with a discretionary range to £38,757)

Post Reference LD-09-004

The new Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford is aimed at pioneering ways for private enterprise, government and academics to work towards solutions to the environmental issues of the 21st century. The School's Director is Professor Sir David King.

We aim to recruit a post-doctoral climate modeller to work in the newly established Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, in the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford. This is a joint appointment between the Smith School and the Department of Physics. The post holder will be based 50% in the Smith School offices and 50% in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics (AOPP) sub-department within Physics.

The primary task of the post-holder is to design and conduct climate modelling experiments using the Met Office's Unified Model on linux systems within the university and setting up ensemble experiments for the distributed computing infrastructure provided by the climateprediction.net project, coordinated by the Oxford e-Research Centre. Most of the work of this PDRA would be setting up new experiments to explore a much wider range of scenarios than are traditionally considered with general circulation models (GCMs).

The successful candidate will have excellent programming skills and experience of GCM climate modelling as well as an ability to work on collaborative interdisciplinary projects.

A full job description and further particulars are available from the website www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk or the School's Administrator, Karen Eveleigh at personnel@smithschool.ox.ac.uk. A PDF of the advertisement is available here and of the job description here.

The closing date for applications is noon on Friday 15th May 2009. Please include the post reference LD-09-004 in all correspondence.

We're experiencing hardware problems with one of our servers and there will therefore be some unplanned downtime whilst we repair it; exactly how long is not known at present but we hope to have something up within 48 hours. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

On Friday the 3rd of April there will be some maintenance in the OUCS server room where our main servers are kept. It will be necessary to shut them down for a while, hopefully no more than 1-2 hours, starting at around 9am on that day. Please keep an eye on the news threads for any further updates.

We've been working on a new website for Climateprediction.net and it's now live. This new site greatly improves our ability to maintain the site and will make it much easier to add updates and experimental information. We hope you like it!

We will officially be phasing out the classic cpdn client on the 18th of February. Existing Classic users should un-install the classic software and install the supported BOINC version.

Instructions for doing so are here.

Thank you for your contribution, and we hope that you will enjoy running the BOINC version in the future.

The PHP discussion board has now been upgraded to the latest version, including many improved features.

As part of an Oxford University 2008 open day Myles Allen recently gave a lecture on "The Physics of Climate Change," aimed at potential physics undergraduates, that may well be of interest to Climateprediction.net participants. This lecture is available as a Windows media stream and also as a 454MB mp4 download. An audio file and also slides from a similar lecture to 2nd year undergraduates, on "Energy and Climate Change" are available here.

We thought our participants might be amused to see Myles Allen in action in a debate against Bjørn Lomborg, the well-known critic of mainstream opinion on climate change, at last week's Swiss Climate Forum in Thun, Switzerland. Myles would like to make clear the debate format pushed him into being unscientifically combative...

If any participants were at the forum, we'd be happy to hear from you.