Research Associate - Climateprediction.NET

CPDN is a highly successful project using distributed computing resources donated by the general public to perform global climate research, run by the Volunteer Computing Group in the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Climate Dynamics Group in the Department of Physics.  The aim of CPDN is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state of the art climate models.  By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic.  This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle.  This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios.  In the past, estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. Computer resources contributed by the general public, we are able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.  The climateprediction.net experiment should help to "improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including long-term ensemble simulations using complex models", identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a high priority.

Duties and Responsibilities

The person appointed to this post will contribute to the implementation of new experiments either already in beta-test or under development in climateprediction.net, including running coupled climate models to assess the risk of a slow-down in the North Atlantic Circulation, running high-resolution regional models to assess the impacts of climate change up to 2050, running coupled climate models to follow up on the successful BBC Climate Change Experiment (winner of the Prix Europa Internet Project of the Year 2007) for input into the 5th Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and developing novel methods of identifying realistic model versions.  The post holder will be expected to promote the use of distributed computing in the UK climate science community by working with the NeRC National Centres for Atmospheric Science and Oceanography, while contributing to the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) open-source community, and to work to integrate distributed computing applications with the National Grid Services through the e-Research South initiative.  This will include working through the OeRC Volunteer Computing Group to expand the areas where volunteer computing is used beyond climate modelling; specific duties will include but not be limited to:

• Design and management of server systems for large distributed computing projects
• Developing and maintaining databases of experiments to be performed by volunteers' computers and of results for analysis by project scientists
• Long-term system improvement and data management within the various projects that are supported by climateprediction.net
• Development of interactive web 2.0 tools for supporting the research community making use of the results datasets