A Sussex company is taking part in the world's biggest climate change experiment.

John Packer Associates, the Uckfield-based building services consultants, is one of the first companies in the region to sign up to the BBC and Oxford University project.

The experiment will use a technique known as "distributed computing" which uses the spare capacity in thousands of home and business computers.

Modern computers can perform billions of calculations a second which is far more than the average user needs. Distributed computing makes use of some of that extra juice.

Oxford University scientists are looking for volunteers to install a standard computer model onto their computers to forecast what the climate will be like in the future.

Computer models are notoriously unreliable because small changes to them can have huge effects on predictions. If only one model is used there is no way of telling how accurate it is.

If thousands of models are run, patterns should emerge which will give scientists a clearer picture of what future weather might be like.

Distributed computing is a particularly valuable tool for scientists who have large amounts of data to analyse, or who are modeling very complex systems like the Earth's climate.

John Packer Associates is installing the modeling software on its staff computers Stephen Saxton, senior engineer with John Packer Associates, said: "This is an exciting opportunity to be involved in the biggest experiment of its kind. As engineers, we are actively involved in the challenges of delivering low energy buildings to our clients that are both energy efficient and sustainable. The results of this experiment will help us design buildings that reduce the problem of global warming."

The software automatically manages the computer's processor whenever the computer is not busy on another task.

When the modeling is complete the results will be sent back to scientists in Oxford, who will combine everyone's results. Trying to predict climate change is not easy.

Air temperature, sea temperature, cloud cover and dozens of other variables all play a part and so there are a huge number of calculations involved.

The results of the experiment will be revealed on BBC Four in May 2006. The more people who take part, the more complete their predictions about the future climate will be.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006