In the wake of a thousand-year drought in Australia and last weekend's lethal cyclone in Burma, the world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing centre that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change.
Meeting at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, the scientists liken the billion-dollar project to CERN, the international particle accelerator near Geneva, and to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. They hope to present their plan to the G8 meeting in Japan this summer.
The modellers say they need a centre with computing power of 100 petaflops – two thousand times greater they have access to today.
"We think we know how to do it, but we need the computing power," said Jagadish Shukla, chair of a meeting of 150 top modellers drawing up the plans...MORE
