The climate models behind predictions of droughts and floods require a colossal amount of data crunching. Scientists have decided to share the load.

NIWA is calling on any member of the public with a computer and an internet connection to volunteer their hardware. Weather@home can be downloaded and run as a background process on a home computer to help crunch climate data. It takes any spare processing power and processes data from both a global climate model and NIWA’s regional climate model, then uploads the results for the scientists to scrutinise. Volunteers can sign up at weatherathome.net