Project news

We've used the Cafepress service to make available some mugs with the Climateprediction.net logo, for the benefit of those crunchers (and CPDN staff members!) who would like to show off their support for the project.

They are currently available at the Cafepress CPDN shop, and each purchase will provide US$2 profit towards the project's operating costs.

Two very popular models are essentially retiring today - HadSM3 and HadAM3P.

Since the dawn of ClimatePrediction.net, HadSM3, an atmospheric general circulation model with a simple one-layer "slab" ocean, has been leading the forefront research of atmospheric parameters. Thanks to enduring popularity, we have acquired a vast knowledge, and the time has come to give way to a fast climate model with 3-D oceans, FAMOUS.

HadAM3P, a high-resolution atmosphere only model with prescribed sea surface temperature, is also removed from the ClimatePrediction.net task queue. This will soon be replaced by a new hybrid model. It consists of an improved version of HadAM3P global model and a higher resolution regional model for a small part of the globe.

There is no need to stop already downloaded model runs; we will continue to retrieve all data for further analyses

For the time being, the fast coupled model, FAMOUS, with new graphics will be distributed through ClimatePrediction.net. Please take part in the Millennium experiment with Famous. It will guide us through the exciting climate changes in human history and a vast range of possible futures.

We take this opportunity to thank all participants again, and hope you enjoy our new generation of models.

Hiro Yamazaki (hiro@cpdn.org)
technical coordinator

“It’s a great honour to be awarded this medal, particularly given the very distinguished list of past recipients. The Climateprediction.net project was specifically singled out in the citation, so I think we should see this as an award to the project as a whole. This is an opportunity to thank everyone involved, the software engineers who built it, the UK Research Councils, European Commission, Met Office and Microsoft Research who paid the bills, the scientists who set up the experiments and continue to pore over our results, and the board moderators who keep everything going. Most of all, of course, I have to thank our participants who continue to provide, entirely voluntarily, a unique resource to the climate research community. Thank you, everyone, and with some exciting new experiments coming on stream, this is a great time for the project.”

—Myles Allen.

The award website can be found here, and there is more information on this specific award here.

The Millennium/Famous experiment has been quiet after a small-scale sneak release on March 24, but we are back with a serious amount of work. We need to run a large ensemble of a global atmosphere-ocean coupled model, FAMOUS, from 800 to 2200 AD plus a preceding "spin-up" period. This experiment is part of the Millennium Project funded by the European Commission for paleo-climate studies of Europe. As the results we obtain cover the entire globe and the future, they will also be used in studies of other regions as well as the future climate change.

We hope you enjoy the fast simulations. Each work unit is 200 years long and is expected to complete in about 1 to 2 weeks on most recent PCs.

For further details, please visit the Millennium/Famous experiment page.

Contact: hiro@cpdn.org

We have now completed the recent server maintenance - thanks for your patience.

We are undertaking work on our BOINC server and there will therefore be outages in the next 24 hours. This website will continue to operate, as will the phpBB board, but clients will not be able to connect and the BOINC user pages may be inaccessible. We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to have full service restored as soon as possible.

Oxford University has set up a page where donations can be made to the Oxford e-Research Centre's Volunteer Computing Group. This is where the computing work of Climateprediction.net is done and will therefore allow anyone who would like to contribute to the running costs of the project to do so.

For more information, please see our donations page.

CPDN would like to wish all participants a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! As always, many thanks for your continued support of the project. CPDN is very close to the impressive milestone of 50 million model years! None of this would be possible without your support - THANK YOU!

For some time the Recent Average Credit calculations for one particular model type (HadAM3P) have been too high. We've been working on this problem and have deployed an adjustment to the credit calculation scripts that should correct it. Actual credits will be unaffected by this fix. We expect the corrected RAC values to start showing up on the various BOINC stats sites within 24 hours.

Both CPDN and Myles Allen receive a brief mention in this Financial Times article.