The Climateprediction.net project is harnessing the spare CPU cycles of tens of thousands of individual users' PCs to run a massive ensemble of climate simulations using the Met Office's Unified Model. The project has been running since September 2003 and has progressed through several modelling experiments from an initial climate sensitivity experiment through to the launch of the fully Atmosphere/Ocean coupled transient climate response experiment in February 2006. Full details of the project's experimental strategy is available from the Climateprediction.net website

This dataset is now public following a 2 year access restriction to academic users only as per the Climateprediction.net data protocol.

You can now access the dataset via the Browse Archive pages of the BADC web-interface or via anonymous FTP.

The data is divided into a series of volumes with a consistent directory structure. Volumes are filled in the order data is submitted and therefore a single volume may contain simulations from multiple Climateprediction.net experiments.

The first volume in the dataset (vol-000) is a quality controlled subset of early Climateprediction.net data that is documented seperately here. This volume contains aproximately 2500 runs with a total size of 13Gb. Subsequent volumes will be an order of magnitude larger.

Each simulation is stored within a volume at a URL matching the following pattern:

ftp://ftp.ceda.ac.uk/badc/cpdn/volumes/vol-xxx/model/yy/result-name

Where xxx is a zero-padded volume number, model identifies the type of Climateprediction.net simulation (e.g. standard for the HadSM3 slab model experiment or sulphur for the HadSM3 + sulphur cycle experiment) and yy is a directory branch designed to limit the size of individual directories. The directory branch yy is currently calculated as the first 2 characters of the simulation's UM id, which is usually also part of the result-name. However, this feature should not be assumed as future volumes may use a different convention.

Within each simulation directory data is stored as a series of NetCDF files conforming to the CF metadata standard.

Documentation:

• Climateprediction.net data protocol
• Volume 000 (initial quality controled subset) documentation

Links:

• Climateprediction.net website

If you would like to know more about Climateprediction.net data and how to obtain it from the BADC, you should contact us through the BADC support line.