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Projects: Observing EarthClimateprediction.net: Researching Climate-Change on your Home ComputerAn Observing Earth update by Amir Alexander
Back in 1999, with seed money from The Planetary Society, SETI researcher Dan Werthimer and computer scientist David Anderson launched SETI@home -- a project that made it possible ordinary computer users to take part in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The project became an overnight sensation, expanding within months to hundreds of thousands of users around the world. A few years later, building on this success David Anderson created BOINC(Berkeley Online Infrastructure for Network Computing) to make it possible for researchers in other fields to take advantage of the enormous untapped computing capacity of privately-owned personal computers. The following is the story of one of the most successful BOINC projects to date. Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing projects that makes it possible for PC owners to help predict the direction and rate of climate change. By downloading a simple software program users can take part in a highly sophisticated climate modeling experiment run by the Open University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. For The Planetary Society the success of Climateprediction.net shows how the field it helped launch nearly a decade ago has come full circle. Large-scale distributed computing, which began with the search for extraterrestrials, now helps investigate the effects of intelligent life on our home planet, Earth. With the exception of SETI@home itself, the most popular and high-profile BOINC project, is climateprediction.net, based at Oxford University and the Open University in the United Kingdom. As its name indicates, climateprediction.net investigates one of today’s most pressing concerns for both science and public policy: Earth’s future climate. “It all began,” explained Co-Principal Investigator Bob Spicer of the Open University, “in the late 1990s when Myles Allen of Oxford noticed the SETI@home screen-saver on a colleague’s computer.” After the concept was explained to him, he began to wonder, “Would it be possible to model the Earth’s climate in this way?” It wasn’t easy. Climate models are extremely complex, dividing Earth’s surface into small square regions, then dividing these in turn into separate layers of the atmosphere. The model operates over time, taking into account such factors as the increasing effect of human-generated greenhouse gases that can heat up Earth and sulfur that cools the planet by blocking sunlight. Then there’s the effect of the oceans, which account for around 50 percent of any climate change. To further complicate things, the atmosphere and the oceans operate on different time scales: the atmosphere can respond to climate change factors in a matter of days, but the oceans can take centuries to change their patterns. All this makes for a very challenging computational exercise requiring the most advanced and fastest computational resources available.
In September 2003, Allen, Spicer, and their colleagues launched climateprediction.net. The first version was simplified and did not account for the oceans. It took on the easier problem of determining what effect a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would have on Earth’s climate. Even simplified, climateprediction.net was already doing better than competing models: by January 2005, when the first article appeared in Nature, climateprediction.net had run 2,570 simulations of Earth’s climate, compared with only 127 by the supercomputer at the Met Office, the British government agency responsible for monitoring weather and climate. In the second stage of the project, Oxford and the Open University were joined by a surprising new partner: the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Eager to engage the public in the debate over climate change, the BBC was planning a series of documentaries on global warming and its effect, due to air in 2006. It offered to make climateprediction.net an integral part of its plans, promote it in its documentaries, and invite the public to take part. It was an offer that Allen, Spicer, and their colleagues could not pass up. The new version of climateprediction.net, also known as “the BBC experiment,” was far more complex than the earlier one. A realistic ocean was now an integral part of the model, and rather than compare distinct states (current levels of CO2 vs. double those levels), the program followed the evolution of the climate by tracking the contributing factors. Unlike the early version, the new climateprediction.net was a member of the BOINC family. The BBC, meanwhile, did its part. To inaugurate the project in February 2006, it aired an hour-long documentary, titled Meltdown, on climate change. The documentary invited people to take part in the BBC experiment, and the project was an overnight hit. Within 10 days of the airing of Meltdown, 100,000 people in 143 countries had downloaded the software and were running climateprediction.net on their computers. Within a month, that number had doubled. According to Spicer, climateprediction.net demands far more of a computer than does SETI@home. A typical PC can process a SETI@home work unit in a few days, but completing a single climateprediction.net simulation could take months. Nevertheless, by the end of 2006, more than 50,000 simulations had been completed and sent back to the project’s headquarters. To mark the completion of the BBC experiment, the network aired another documentary, titled Climate Change: Britain Under Threat, hosted by respected British broadcaster David Attenborough. Although the BBC’s involvement has ended for now, climateprediction.net is going strong. By July of 2008 it had already run simul;ations of 33 million model years, millions more are planned to fully explore the effects of all 23 parameters included in the expeiriment. “This is genuine science that cannot be done any other way,” said Spicer. “It uses a state-of-the-art model, and it feeds into an ongoing public debate.”
--The above text is based on a SETI@home update published in July, 2007. Did you like this story? Send
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