Over To You

In the spirit of COP21 some of my fellow Environmental Modellers have been suggesting ways that we can, as individuals, contribute to the ethos of green living – Any Earth Left has been giving some great ways how we can make a positive impact on reducing our emissions as a consumer, and The Global Hot Potato has been providing some yummy environmentally friendly recipes to whet your appetite.

So, how else can I play my part I hear you ask?

Well, a team of climate scientists over at the University of Oxford have developed a novel way that you can contribute to the challenge we face of climate change. Albeit not by reducing emissions, and without even leaving the comfort of your home. Climateprediction.net is ‘the world’s largest climate modelling experiment for the 21^st century’, which boasts a community of volunteers to run climate models from their home computers, via computing platform BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, the importance of modelling the environment is paramount to understanding, learning, and predicting, what has, is, and will happen in the future given certain conditions. When this comes to the climate, we have to do so in large scale, hence, the number of climate models to be run is vast. Vast enough, that even supercomputers struggle. Instead, teams in the Environmental Change Institute, the Oxford e-Research Centre, and the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, departments at University of Oxford have adopted a technique called ensemble modelling which means thousands of people each run a tiny part of the climate model on their personal computers (you don’t need anything fancy, but there are a few system requirements), and then send back the results for them to be interpreted. The site assures volunteers that the greenhouse gas emission generated by leaving your computer running for longer than you might otherwise do is very small.

There are some really interesting projects currently underway including:

• Assessing the risk of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapse in the coming century (see RAPID-RAPIT)

• Investigating the response of rainfall, evaporation, and river run off, to changes in land use and the carbon cycle (see HYDRA)

• What the impact of stratospheric aerosol particles and solar radiation management would be (see Geoengineering)

Over the past few months, in certain lectures, it’s often been said that even Climate Change students don’t see themselves as modellers. With this facility from the University of Oxford, now everyone can call themselves modellers, and I think even more impressively, climate modellers.