Years ago, when I joined CP, the project was running climate models for a group associated with Oxford University. That went on for years and I have to admit I didn't pay any attention as I let my PC run every night without checking on what was going on.

Now I see there is something called Weather@home and checking the tasks with Boinc Account Manager the application is "weather@home 2" with nothing to indicate specifically what the project is doing. Looking at the CP site, there are many weather@home projects, but none for weather@home 2.

Can someone tell me what weather@home 2 is accomplishing in the tasks that my PC is running?

It's the same group running the project as before, part of Oxford University. Some of the models are now supplied by other research groups around the world.

The range of applications has increased, including weather@home. At the moment models are available for Windows and Linux.

The big change in the time I've been running models is the change from global models to regional models, which took advantage of the increased power of PCs. One of the uses of these models now is for "attribution" studies, in which the probability of a real event (a flood, a drought, a fire) is calculated: that is quite a change from the older models, which were principally concerned with predicting climate change and assessing the uncertainties in those predictions.

weather@home

"W@H 2" uses version 2 of the Weather at Home program(s).

There's a section about it linked from the projects front page, in the menu across the top.
weather@home.

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Also on the front page, is some info about models from a different source, some of which were run early last year.
Oxford e-Research Centre teams up with ECMWF to enable scientists to run the OpenIFS weather model on thousands of people’s home computers.

edit
I'm still typing too slowly. :)

Thanks for the info.

Then from the listing of tasks, it is no longer possible to know what exact program one is running...i.e what sub-project of W@H2? It used to be the task name would allow me to know that I was running one for Africa, or the Atlantic or global, etc.

One other thing, though I had it disabled, there was a graphic that could be run that showed the area the tasks were operating on while the processing was going on. Do the W@H tasks have that feature?

It’s still the case that the area is present in the model name.

For the model wah2_pnw25_b1l9_199412_15_864_011989350_0 running on one of your PCs, for example, the “pnw25” means it’s Pacific North-West at 25 km resolution. The “_15_” means it runs for 15 model months. The “_864_” is the batch number.

There aren’t any graphics any more. However, there is a thread on this message board that describes the regions, as they appear from time to time: New region?

There is also a descriptive page here: Regions

Thank you for the information.