Posted by Andy on our php board:

Submission of new Weather At Home batch covering Europe over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s

We have just submitted a new batch of Weather At Home workunits. These new workunits form part of the Weather at Home project and are a perturbed physics ensemble of historical (1970s-1990s) climate. We are investigating modelling uncertainty by perturbing important model parameters. The aim is to quantify how these perturbations effect simulated weather in Europe between 1970 and 2000. Once again many thanks for running these models!

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Backups: Here

Posted by Andy on the phpBB forum:

Publication of first results from Weather At Home experiment!

In the summer 2010 Western Russia was hit by an extraordinary heat wave, with the region experiencing by far the warmest July since records began. Whether or not this event was caused (in parts) by anthropogenic climate change has been a source controversy. Dole et al. (2011) reported that the 2010 Russian heat wave was "mainly natural in origin" whereas Rahmstorf and Coumou (2011) wrote that with a probability of 80% "the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred" without large-scale climate warming since 1980. Most of this large scale warming has been attributed to the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The latter study explicitly states that their results "contradict those of Dole et al. (2011)".

By using the results from the Weather At Home experiment we show that there is no substantive contradiction between these two papers. The same event can be both mostly internally-generated in terms of magnitude and mostly externally-driven in terms of the probability of such an event occurring. The difference in conclusion between these two papers illustrates the importance of specifying precisely what question is being asked. We argue you need to ask both questions, whether the magnitude was inside the natural variability and whether the frequency of such heatwaves to occur has changed. Our answer is that the magnitude of the heat wave was mainly natural in origin, but the possibility of such a heat wave occurring has increased by a factor of 3-4 times due to anthropogenic climate change.

We would like to thank all the participants for running the models for this study!

More can be read about this paper in the following links:
http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2012/2012-10.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/climate-change-russian-heatwave

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As can be seen from the Server Status page, uploader.oerc is currently shut down. It has a problem which is being looked into.

This server handles the restart data files for all 3 Weather at Home (regional) models, (zip 13), so until it's fixed, computers won't be able to upload these. :(

It also houses the auto-regen program, which takes the data from these restart data files, and uses it to create the next data set in the series for each model.
So there won't be any of these for a while either.

For those who are only running cpdn, just shut off the Network access after the other zips have been uploaded.
For those running multiple projects and who need to have continual Network access, commiserations.

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Backups: Here

Posted by Andy on the Independent forum:

"abowery" wrote:

Publication of results from BBC climate change experiment

This week the first results from the climateprediction.net BBC climate change experiment were published in Nature Geoscience. The experiment, first launched in 2006, represents the first multi thousand member ensemble of simulations using a complex coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model, and addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using simpler models or only a few dozen simulations, may have over-looked. Results from the experiment suggest that a global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 is as equally plausible as a rise of 1.4 degrees (relative to the 1961-1990 average). This range is derived from the range of simulations in the ensemble that accurately reproduce observed temperature changes over the last 50 years.

The results suggest that the world is very likely to cross the '2 degrees barrier' at some point this century if emissions continue unabated, and that those planning for the impacts of climate change need to consider the possibility of warming of up to 3 degrees (above the 1961-1990 average) by 2050 even on a mid-range emission scenario. This is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

We would like to thank all the participants involved in the BBC climate change experiment for their continued support to the project!

Link: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1430.html

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Cpdn news

Posted by Andy on our php board:

Submission of new Weather At Home batch covering Western US from 1959-1998

These new workunits form part of the Weather At Home and are a perturbed physics ensemble of historical (1959-1998) climate. The workunits are for the Western US region and are identical to those released for the EU region at the beginning of January 2012. We are investigating modelling uncertainty by perturbing 12 important model parameters. The aim is to quantify how these perturbations effect simulated weather in the Western US. Once again many thanks for running these models!

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Backups: Here

As can be seen from the Server Status page, 2 of the upload servers are currently shut down due to hard disk problems:

• uploader.oerc receives the final upload files (_13.zip) for all of the Weather at Home (HadAM3P regional) tasks. These files are required to generate the atmosphere and ocean restart files for the next data set in the task series.
  
  
• uploader1.atm receives the intermediate uploads (_1.zip to _12.zip) for some of the hadam3p_eu tasks.
  

Jonathan is planning to install a Virtual Machine to take over their jobs tomorrow. Hopefully the available pool of work won't be exhausted before he completes the job.

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Posted by Andy on our php board:


Submission of new Weather At Home batch covering the European region

We have just submitted a new batch/ensemble of workunits. The experiment aims to try and quantify to what degree recent climate change can be attributed to the effects of human interference in the climate system. The driving conditions fed into the models are modified to reflect what they would have been like if we had not produced the greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions that we have over the past century. The difference between these simulations and the initial "baseline" runs (which CPDN participants have been running over the last year) will provide the basis for assessing the human contribution to recent weather trends. In the first instance, these simulations will be run for the last decade (2000-2010). This will allow us to investigate recent extreme weather events, such as the 2010 Russian heatwave and the 2007 UK flooding. This work also builds on previous CPDN research, which looked at the anthropogenic contribution to UK flood risk in the year 2000.

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Backups: Here

Posted on our php board:

Essential maintenance on our storage infrastructure will require our main uploads servers to go out of service at the following time:

Wed 30 May 2012; 8:30-10:30 GMT

The following servers will be affected

cpdn-uploads2.oerc.ox.ac.uk
uploader.oerc.ox.ac.uk
cpdn-restarts.oerc.ox.ac.uk
climateapps1.oerc.ox.ac.uk

I anticipate that the service will be resumed within the allocated time period, and that downloads deferred during this period will catch up over the next few hours.

If you experience any problems after this scheduled downtime, please let us know by posting on the boards.

Jonathan Miller

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Backups: Here

The project's servers have been having problems of various types for several days now. Some of this requires a physical presence in the server rooms, and, as this requires access permission from the IT people in charge of the various rooms, which are in various buildings across the city which is the University of Oxford, nothing will start to be done until Monday morning UK time.

Some of these 'repairs' may require a server to be taken off line. In the past this has sometimes been for several days.

The Server Status page can be accessed from the blue menu to the left of here, 5 from the bottom.

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Backups: Here

The servers are all now running again.
However there's a lot of pushing and shoving from zips waiting in the queues, resulting in messages such as:

Error on file upload: can't open log file '../log_aforgomon/file_upload_handler.log' (errno: 9)
Temporarily failed upload of hadam3p_eu_cv85_2006_1_007960023_0_12.zip: transient upload error

Patience is the only cure.

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Backups: Here

The problem mentioned in the previous post was due to a program failing. This has been fixed.
But now a server is down, possibly filled up.

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Backups: Here

Jonathan has posted in the News thread of the independent forum:

The data centre in which our servers are hosted has suffered a network problem over the last 24 hours.

The result is that two of our upload servers have had to be taken offline until further notice. The affected servers are cpdn-upload2.oerc and cpdn-restarts.oerc.

I don't anticipate a fix until after the weekend, i.e. Monday 18 June. Please accept our apologies about this.

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Cpdn news

Upload failures have stated happening again in the last few hours.

The current problem seems to be a repeat of a one from a few weeks ago; a 'disk mount' failure in the storage server that's fed by the upload server.
The upload server won't know that there's no storage server until it tries to transfer the data at the end of the upload.
This is being discussed, and hopefully a fix will emerge to give the uploader some feedback before it OKs the client computer to start an upload.

The only cure at present is to Suspend the Network in the BOINC manager's menu.
Also, if models are nearing completion, Suspend them in the Tasks tab, so that they don't get a chance to contribute to bandwidth wastage.

And Oxford Uni has just started it's 'Long Vacation', so there's probably only a skeleton staff looking after network problems. And no night shift.

Other changes have also been discussed in recent weeks. These may take a while, and be transparent to users anyway.

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Backups: Here

The cause of the upload problem of the 26-27 June has been fixed.
It was the storage server, but not what I thought.

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Backups: Here

Hi,

Outage 30 June - 2 July.

The above loss of service was caused by a network problem with our database server.

The issue has been resolved.

Apologies for the inconvenience this has caused.

Jonathan

Jonathan says that during the third week of July there'll be a planned outage for the problematic climateapps server, as some of its programs are rather antique. This scheduled outage will be announced in advance.

For the time being our BOINC is only allowed to contact the CPDN servers once every two hours. This reduces the load on the servers. Please do not in the BOINC manager Projects tab repeatedly update CPDN, attempting to make it contact the server more frequently. This is counterproductive as it resets the time limit to the maximum of one or two hours, whichever Jonathan has specified.

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Cpdn news

Andy says:

Two Weather At Home papers published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

(From the press release)

Extreme weather events in 2011 cost billions and claimed thousands of lives, but to what extent can such events be blamed on climate change due to rising greenhouse gas levels? The first set of studies to try to assess the extreme events of 2011 is published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), examining how human and natural influences on climate contributed to the weather events of 2011. Such assessments are a useful tool for those wanting to set levels of compensation, which by coincidence is high on the agenda of the Re|Source workshop in Oxford which was held this week for climate change negotiators from developing countries.

Two papers cited by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society results from the Oxford-led weatherathome project, in which members of the public help model recent weather trends on home computers. One, led by the University of Oregon, showed how the risk of the 2011 Texas heatwave and drought has increased substantially since the 1960s. The second, led by Neil Massey of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, showed how the odds of an exceptionally warm November, such as 2011�s, have increased over the same period in the UK, while the odds of a cold December, like 2010�s, have fallen.

�Where and when extreme weather events occur is still largely a matter of luck,� explains Professor Myles Allen of the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, a co-author on three of these new studies, �but science can help us understand how different factors are loading the weather dice.�

Both these studies note that various factors have contributed to climate change since the 1960s but that most of the recent large-scale warming was very likely due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The third study, led by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, concluded human influence on global climate had little to do with the 2011 floods that devastated Thailand.

�Not all damaging weather events that occur have been made more likely by human-induced climate change,� explains Allen. �Some, like those cold winters, appear to have been made less likely, but can still occur by chance. Others, like those Thai floods, haven�t been affected either way as far as we can tell. Sorting these things out is essential in working out the true cost of climate change.�

The possibility of compensation for unavoidable costs of climate change has explosive implications for international climate change negotiations. Dr Daniel Ortega-Pacheco, Director of Environment and Climate Change in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in Oxford for the workshop of the European Capacity Building Initiative, remarked: �Quantifying loss and damage is vital for evidence-based climate policy. This kind of science will play a key role in future negotiations.�

The workshop for developing country negotiators in international climate change talks is led by Dr Benito M�eller, from the Faculty of Philosophy and Associate of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. The workshop, which took place on the 10th July, was attended by representatives from countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

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Cpdn news

The CPDN BOINC site has been under a sustained spammer attack for 3 weeks. In response to this Jonathan has added highly targeted protection to shut down the attack route.

The spammers have created 109 accounts by attaching a computer to the project with no intention of running tasks (the web option for creating accounts was disabled a long time ago in response to a previous spammer attack).

Although the spam accounts were created from 97 different IP addresses in Romania we suspect they all originated at a single computer.

Some users might find they can't access the pages which have been protected and we can only offer apologies in advance if you are one of them.

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

One of the upload servers has filled up.
They've started to move the data, but from past experience it will take a couple of days to move several hundred gigabytes over the university network.

In the meantime, either:
Turn off the Network connection, or, if you're running multiple projects,

Suspend all climate models and wait it out. In this case, all zips waiting to upload will continue to try doing so at regular intervals.

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Backups: Here

It looks like data is moving OK now.
I uploaded 77 files over night/this morning my time.

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Backups: Here