What's the Weather Like Where you are?

Citizen Science harnesses people power to keep an eye on the weather

When it comes to modelling the climate, there’s no substitute for massive computing power. But that doesn’t necessarily mean massive computers. That’s why the ‘weatherathome’ experiment, part of the Natural Environment Research Council’s LWEC-accredited Storm Risk Mitigation Programme, set out to recruit thousands of computer users worldwide toassess how climate and weather are changing in different regions of the world.

“By asking each volunteer to run our global and regional climate models on their laptop or PC, we’re harnessing total processing power equivalent to a super-computer,”

says Professor Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, which is collaborating with the Met Office and Exeter University on the project. “So far, over 170,000 model runs have been completed and we’re starting to see really valuable results.”

Supported by the Guardian and with additional funding from Microsoft Research, weatherathome is focusing on Europe, the western USA, Southern Africa, and Australia and New Zealand. It’s already generated data which will shed light on the climatic factors that contributed to Russia’s devastating heatwave in 2010. Ultimately, the objective is to aid understanding of exactly where in the world the risk of extreme weather may increase and where the weather may improve in future decades.   

Not many computer modelling initiatives can claim to have secured support from a national newspaper. "Our readers tell us how much they want to help tackle climate change,” explains the Guardian’s Damian Carrington.

“So we were really inspired by this project which enables anyone with a computer to play a key role in groundbreaking scientific research, work that sheds new light on how warming affects everyone's lives”.

And if you want to take part in this experiment you can sign up on the Weatherathome website.