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What is climateprediction.net (CPDN)?

climateprediction.net (CPDN) is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in climate science. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

CPDN is based at the University of Oxford.

News

Announcing the “CPDN Citizen Scientist Career Badges”
CPDN are pleased to announce the introduction of ‘badges’ in recognition of the contribution made by our volunteers over the more than 25 years CPDN has existed. Our badges use a Citizen Scientist theme which seemed appropriate as CPDN is hosted at the University of Oxford, UK.

There are two types of badges.

Progress badges: these 7 badges represent your citizen scientist career path and are awarded for achieving different levels of total credit.

Publication badges: these award volunteers who have computed results included in a scientific publication. Badges indicate the number of publications achieved and can be thought of as the contribution level to climate and atmospheric science.

We analysed the statistical distribution of our user credit and devised a scale that recognizes the contribution from our long-standing volunteers whilst providing early rewards for those just joining the project.

The CPDN Citizen Scientist career: credit levels 

BADGE           MILESTONE   DESCRIPTION
L1: Student     1,000       Successfully complete a first task. 
L2: Graduate    10,000      Successfully complete a long-running task or several shorter ones. 
L3: Postdoc     100,000     A major milestone. Recognises regular crunchers. 
L4: Fellow      500,000     Dedicated cruncher likely completed a variety of tasks for several projects. 
L5: 
Associate Prof  2,000,000   Significant CPDN tenure and a key CPDN volunteer. 
L6: Professor   8,000,000   The “Top 500”. Exceptional dedication. You are among the elite volunteers. 
L7: Emeritus    25,000,000  The "Top 100." A legacy of outstanding service to climate science and CPDN.

These credit levels mean that 96% of our current volunteer community will have already achieved a badge.

The levels are represented on the badges by two letters e.g. ‘ST’ for student, ‘AP’ for associate professor due to their small appearance on the web pages.

The full-size images can be seen under the web page: https://main.cpdn.org/stats.php.

How much "Work" is required?

To help you plan your next promotion, here is a breakdown of what it takes to move up the CPDN citizen scientist career ladder. This is based on the Weather@Home2 application used extensively for projects and typically awards around 20,000 credit per completed task. 

BADGE               CREDIT        Weather@Home2 (20k credit per completed task)
Student             1k            1 task
Graduate            10k           1 task 
Postdoc             100k          5 tasks 
Fellow              500k          25 tasks 
Assoc Prof          2M            100 tasks 
Professor           8M            400 tasks 
Emeritus            25M           1,250 tasks

Credit varies between apps and from project to project. These numbers are a guide only.

What’s Next?

These badges will be appearing on user profiles shortly. Your badge level will update automatically as you continue to return results.

We have no current plans to introduce Team Badges.

Happy Crunching!

— The CPDN Team
9 Feb 2026, 17:23:41 UTC · Discuss

Happy New Year and update for 2026
We wish all the volunteers a Happy New Year and thank everyone for their contributions to CPDN to date.

CPDN looks forward to a busy 2026. We have recently been tidying our databases and systems. We will also be implementing badges soon, similar to other BOINC based projects.

There is more production work to come on the PAREST OpenIFS project (linux based). A small test batch went out at the end of last year. A larger production batch is now planned, though no release date as yet. There are also other projects being discussed. Plus there is continued development of our backend and workunit control software. It's likely we'll be sending out some test batches as beta applications in the near future as part of this development.

Thank you to all our volunteer number crunchers, our moderators and all our forum users for contributing to bring issues to our attention and solve issues for others.

The CPDN team.
19 Jan 2026, 11:05:43 UTC · Discuss

CPDN project downtime from Tuesday 3:30pm (UK time)
I hope you all had a good festive break. Just to let you know that the CPDN project will be going offline from tomorrow (Tuesday) at 3:30pm (UK time). This is in order to conduct some essential backend maintenance work. It is expected that this work may take several days to complete. Thank you in advance for your patience.

Update: this work has now been completed.
5 Jan 2026, 12:44:48 UTC · Discuss

Project PAREST - New batches
Project description: Exploring the role of circulation biases in limiting seasonal predictability

Recent work has shown that operational seasonal forecast models have deficient responses to predictable forcing (e.g. ENSO) on seasonal timescales. These appear to be linked to persistent circulation biases in the atmosphere – similar issues are also found in coupled climate models used to make projections on longer timescales. In this OpenIFS@home project we will create perturbed model parameter ensembles to generate a range of different atmospheric states and explore which atmospheric circulation biases act to limit circulation signals in the extratropics.

This project is led by scientists at the University of Reading, Meteorology Department.

For more details of the batches, please see the CPDN Forums.

Technical details:
App: OpenIFS 43r3 Multi-core Linear grid Tl319L91
Linux only.
4 physical cores required.
Expected task run-time: 2-7 days depending on hardware and boinc client settings.
Checkpoint files for this app are 4.5Gb.

This application has a peak memory usage of 26Gb. Only one task will be sent to each host at a time.

To contribute to this project you must enable the 'OpenIFS Tl319' option on the CPDN Project Preferences page on your CPDN web account and have enough free resource in the boinc client for the task.

Please ensure you have 'Leave non-GPU applications in memory whilst suspended' enabled. This prevents a restart from checkpoint files which is costly.

Please raise any issues/questions on our forums.
10 Nov 2025, 13:44:06 UTC · Discuss

Project DEPICT-SNOW: New batches
Project description:
While global mean snowfall is projected to decrease due to global warming, it remains unclear how the extreme snowfall will respond to global warming. This UK Research and Innovaton (UKRI) funded MSCA project aims to study the response of extreme snowfall in the upcoming decades to future global warming. The project will run three large-ensemble seasonal weather forecast experiments including one control and two sensitivity experiments to accomplish the project objectives. It is anticipated that the results will significantly improve our understanding of future extreme snowfall change.

Technical details:
App: OpenIFS 43r3 Multi-core Linear grid Tl319L91
Linux only.
4 physical cores required (not user changeable).
Expected task run-time: 4-6 days depending on hardware.
Checkpoint files for this app are 4.5Gb.
Each set of model output files is 22Mb.

Please note to contribute to this batch you must enable the 'OpenIFS Tl319' option on the CPDN Project Preferences page on your CPDN web account and have enough free resource in the boinc client for the task.

Please also ensure you have 'Leave non-GPU applications in memory whilst suspended' enabled. This prevents a restart from checkpoint files which is costly.

This application has a peak memory usage of 26Gb. Only one task will be sent to each host at a time.

Please raise any issues/questions on our forums.
13 Aug 2025, 15:25:43 UTC · Discuss

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