Making climate modelling accessible

Back to index page

Previous article: Engage provides a picture of the UK's e-Research community

Next article: Radiotherapy to become more accurate

A simple, fast-running model of the Earth’s climate system was one of the end-products of the GENIE project. Making this system available to a more diverse research community is the goal of the Engage-funded Aladin2 project.

GENIE allowed users to model the climate over long timeframes – even those stretching over many thousands of years – albeit with a lesser degree of granularity than gained with other climate-modelling systems. The modular construction of GENIE enabled Open University students to acquire a stand-alone simulator that was used to create real-time models of various Earth projections. Funding from the Engage Initiative will help the GENIE project to combine their system with a MatLab toolbox, providing users with far greater control over the climate model.

Current climate models, including GENIE, typically require users to possess a significant degree of computing expertise. Aladin2 will be considerably easier to use. The project will provide a prototype of a launchpad application that will help with the set-up and launch of the GENIE climate-modelling system. It will also facilitate the system’s use in training workshops for PhD students and other researchers, and in Masters-level teaching units at the Universities of East Anglia and Bristol. The launchpad will be updated following evaluation in these environments, and an improved version will be released. It is anticipated that an NGS-hosted version of the application will appear shortly afterwards. The new application will facilitate the simple set-up and sharing of ensemble experiments, and will remove the need for extensive computing experience, making GENIE accessible, not only to a wider range of scientists, but to the public as well.

http://www.genie.ac.uk