Thursday 26 Oct: Climate Change and Digital Preservation

This meeting was held jointly with the BCS Chester and North Wales Branch over a video link between two CCLRC labs: the Rutherford and Appleton lab near Chilton in Oxfordshire and the Daresbury lab in Cheshire.

Joint meeting

Brian Day introducing the joint meeting

Dr. Brian Day, secretary of BCS Oxfordshire branch, introduced the evening to branch members and guests at the Rutherford lab, and, using the video link, to the audience at Daresbury.

Audience at RAL

 

 

 

 

 

Climate Prediction: Predicting the Future

Our speaker at RAL was Dr Keith Norman of Tessella.

Keith described the climateprediction.net project, which had been built using the same framework as the SETI project to allow many KeithNorman with the running climate model visible at both RAL and DaresburyPCs to work on problem. This is the world’s largest experiment to attempt to forecast the climate of the 21st century. Keith described the background to the experiment (developed in part by Tessella, with Oxford and Cambridge Universities, CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Met Office, and others), and showed how the software could help scientists to understand the global climate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slides

Keith’s slides are PDFhere (1.3MB) and also linked from our downloads page.

Digital Preservation: Preserving the Past

Viking Lander data Peter Lloyd speaks from Daresbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our speaker from Daresbury was Peter Lloyd, also of Tessella.

Peter described the issues surrounding Digital Preservation; with several examples of very public digital records which were nearly lost.

Peter discussed the challenges of ensuring that the digital information created and stored today will be accessible for as long as it may be needed.

Slides

Peter’s slides are PDFhere (614KB) and also linked from our downloads page.