Modelling extreme weather on home PCs

What can Weather@Home ANZ tell us about changing climate and weather extremes? Seminar with Sue Rosier (NIWA)

One of the most reliable ways of understanding future climate extremes is through distributed computing. weather@home, based in the United Kingdom, is a highly successful citizen science project, in which volunteers from around the world donate their PCs’ spare processing power, running state-of-the-art climate models and returning the results.

The enormous amount of computing power harnessed in this way enables these models to be run many more times than usually possible, enough for scientists to investigate how climate and weather extremes might be changing with the human influence on climate.

In weather@home ANZ we’ve examined recent extreme rainfall events that have caused significant flooding, and been able to quantify the degree to which human influence altered the risk of such events. Matching this information with estimates of the insured losses from these events, it’s also possible to estimate the financial cost of the human influence on climate.