I like the climateprediction.net screensaver - especially the earth with smoothed clouds but I have one suggestion for inprovement:

One side of the earth is lit 06:00 to 18:00, the other one is lit from 18:00 to 06:00. Also the lighting is the same throughout the year and there is no difference between summer and winter.

The calculations surely require the exact position of the sun, so is there a way to use this information for the lighting of the earth?

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This doesn't really answer your question, but while the screensaver is cool, it can also use up a lot of CPU cycles. You may want to open Task Manager (if in WindowsXP/2K) and see how much the visualization is using. The model itself will take more than 90 percent (99% on most of my PCs) without the visualization running, and depending on your video card and CPU, the visualization can take 5, 10, 50% or even more. So if you find it is taking up a large portion of your CPU cycles, you may want to run the graphics only when you actually want to see/view what is occurring with your world. Of course it's your PC and you can use it however you want, just thought you should know the potential downside of the screensaver.

> This doesn't really answer your question, but while the screensaver is cool,
> it can also use up a lot of CPU cycles. You may want to open Task Manager (if
> in WindowsXP/2K) and see how much the visualization is using. The model
> itself will take more than 90 percent (99% on most of my PCs) without the
> visualization running, and depending on your video card and CPU, the
> visualization can take 5, 10, 50% or even more.

A tip: Setting the model to "BelowNormal" while keeping the vizualisation at "Low" makes sure the visualization doesn't use much CPU.

/Nis

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