• Question: What are the super computers you use at work like and how do they guess what might happen in the future?

    Asked by lucky260 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hey lucky260,

      Super computers are just like lots and lots of the pc’s you use put together. Some super computers, like the one in the Met Office actually take up a whole room! We run computer models which we use to predict what is going to happen in the future. We can run these on normal computers but it could take the normal pc months to work out the answer whereas a super computer would only take an hour! This means that we can do much more reasreach more quickly! So its not actually the super computers that allow us to predict the future, its the computer models.

      The computer models work by calculating equations for all the processes that go on in the world e.g. the suns radiation hitting the earth, atmospheric circulation, the water cycle. We can then run the computer model for any period of time into the future to see what the state of the earth will be like. Its pretty cool what they do but when you actually look at one it is millions of lines of code whihc is pretty hard to figure out!!!

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hey lucky260,

      Nuala has pretty much answered this, but if you wanted to run a climate model yourself you can do it if you visit this website: http://climateprediction.net/

      I actually took part in this back in 2003! and now nearly 10 years later these guys are my colleagues as we work on some very similar ways of investigating the climate, only they work on the future and I work in the past!

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