Climate models can run for months on supercomputers – but my new algorithm can make them ten times faster

By Samar Khatiwala, Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Climate models are some of the most complex pieces of software ever written, able to simulate a vast number of different parts of the overall system, such as the atmosphere or ocean. Many have been developed by hundreds of scientists over decades and are constantly being added to and refined. They can run to over a million lines of computer code – tens of thousands of printed pages.

Not surprisingly, these models are expensive. The simulations take time, frequently several months, and the supercomputers on which the models are run consume a lot of energy. But a new algorithm

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