Climateprediction.net/PRECIS: Transferring the tools and skills for regional climate prediction.

科学家们一致认为，在21世纪，地球的平均气温将上升1.4至5.8摄氏度。要预测某一特定地区的气候将如何变化，以及这种变化将对当地的供水、海平面、农业和极端天气事件产生何种影响，难度要大得多。进行区域气候预报的最佳方法是将细尺度区域气候模式与粗尺度全球模式结合使用。然而，这一过程对计算机资源的要求非常高，目前只能由发达国家的少数几个中心进行。这个提议是为了扩展climateprediction.net项目，该项目目前在世界各地有超过10万人在他们的家用电脑上运行一个全球模型。通过将这种分布式计算设备提供给世界各地的科学家，特别是发展中国家的科学家，他们将能够设计和实施气候模拟实验，这将使他们能够前所未有地获得有关当地气候将如何变化的信息。这将有助于他们向负责规划气候变化对当地影响的政府和政策制定者提供信息。

Scientists are in agreement that, on average, the Earth's climate will warm by 1.4 to 5.8 K in the 21st century. It is much harder to say how the climate will change in a particular place, and what impacts that change will have on the local water supply, sea level, agriculture and extreme weather events. The best method for making a regional climate forecast, involves using a fine scale regional climate model in conjunction with a coarse scale, global model. However, this process is extremely demanding on computer resources, and can only currently be carried out by a handful of centres, in the developed world. This proposal is to extend the climateprediction.net project, which currently has over 100,000 people around the world running a global model on their home computers. By making this distributed computing facility available to scientists around the world, particularly in the developing world, they will be able to design and carry out climate modelling experiments which will give them unprecedented access to information about how the climate in their local region will change. This will help them inform the government and policymakers responsible for planning for the impacts of climate change in their local region.