Once you have completed one of our climate model simulations, your results are sent to our server for analysis. After a short while, a plot is made which summarises the parts of your results most important to us. This page helps you to understand that plot.

Typically, your results plot can found by going to Your account, then following the links for Results -> Result ID -> Result Graph.

• Currently, a plot is made of total daily England & Wales precipitation simulated by your model. This is in the form of a daily timeseries over the period April 2000 - March 2001 in which we are interested. For comparison, a corresponding timeseries of actual observed precipitation for the time is also overlayed. A typical plot is shown below:

  

• As shown in the title, the climate scenario here used for the simulation in this particular plot is the Industrial Autumn 2000 ('A2000') scenario, which represents the climate under the presence of emission of human-induced greenhouse gases for that time (see Project overview for more details). Also shown in the title is the workunit ('wu') ID.

  The thin blue line shows the resulting timeseries of total England & Wales daily precipitation simulated under this scenario. The thin red line then shows the corresponding precipitation for that time from an observational dataset (in this case the ECMWF ERA-40 dataset).

  For ease of comparison, both these timeseries have also been smoothed with a 31-day running mean filter which are shown as the thick lines of appropriate colour.

  Finally, in the top right corner of the plot are displayed values of precipitation totals for the April2000-March2001 and Autumn2000 periods (i.e. the sum over the timeseries for those periods). These are displayed for both the model simulation ('Mod') and the observation ('Obs'). You may notice that the observation total is usually higher than the model total, and this is to be expected because the actual precipitation event observed was a very extreme one, so that most of the time simulations will not be able to come close to it - but some will, and these are the ones that are the really interesting ones ( see, e.g., Beta test results for more details).
  
  
  

• Below is another typical plot, now for the the Non-industrial Autumn 2000 ('NIA2000') scenario, which represents the climate for that time had there not been any emission of human-induced greenhouse gases over the last century (again see Project overview for more details).

  

  This time, the thin green line shows the resulting timeseries of total England & Wales daily precipitation simulated under this scenario, with the other lines described as above. Again there are precipitation totals given in the top right hand corner.
  
  
  

• We then gather the above Autumn 2000 total precipitation values from all completed simulations returned to us, and make a histogram, similar to that shown in Beta test results.

  That way we can compare the results of all Industrial and Non-industrial simulated Autumn 2000 precipitation, to the actual observed value for that time. Hence we can determine how the frequency of occurrence (or 'risk') of such precipitation has changed, and therefore how much risk is attributable to human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases over the last century.

  Once the project has finished, we will publish our histogram with the final results, where we expect to have gathered around 1000 simulations for each climate.
  
  
  

• A a final note: as well as returning a simulation of daily England and Wales total precipitation for the April 2000 - March 2001 period, your uploaded results also include concurrent simulations of other variables for that time over various other regions of the world (since the model has global coverage).

  Specifically, there is daily precipitation and temperature returned for the Atlantic-European, Northwest USA, South Africa and India. This is described in more detail in our Collaborations, and the regions are illustrated in the figure below:

  

  Also concurrently simulated are monthly precipitation, temperature, sea-level pressure, winds and land soil moisture over the whole globe.

  If you are at an academic research institution and would like to use this data to investigate the effects of climate change in your region, then please get in touch with us via our Message Boards.