Linux Powers Climate Research: 400TB of Data and Counting

“Climate change is perhaps the biggest issue facing humanity
today – but one vital part of the puzzle is to calculate what
exactly the future possibilities are. The Millennium Simulations
project – now almost a year old – aims to tackle that
issue, generating data which will in due course be used by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international
scientific body which is generally regarded as the authoritative
voice on the effects and risks of climate change. The Millenium
Simulations creates models of the earth’s climate, looking at the
influence of human activity (including carbon generation and
changes in land use), together with natural activity such as
volcanoes, to project future climatic changes. It’s the first model
which uses an interactive carbon cycle, and it also has various
sub-models available, looking at land, ocean, and atmosphere.

“As you might guess, this project generates a lot of data (over
50TB to date) with repeated runs under various conditions. There
are numerous other climate modelling projects out there, as well,
all generating large quantities of data which is useful to climate
scientists internationally. Dealing with storage of and access to
this data is the World Data Center for Climate (WDCC), part of the
World Data System.”

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