The University of Cape Town is to monitor climate change in Africa with the help of IBM's World Community Grid.

Environmental changes have particularly serious implications for Africa because of the widespread lack of healthcare and social services. The AfricanClimate@Home project will use the grid's massive computing power to improve regional climate models, allowing for more accurate predictions of how changing weather patterns will affect the continent.

Users of the system download a client program which carries out minor calculations while their computer is idle. The combined activity of the grid's global community creates a virtual supercomputer, capable of powerful data processing tasks.

The AfricanClimate@Home project will use the processing power to create algorithms used in simulations of flooding and similar climate problems. The virtual models will then be compared with real-world observations.

'Making predictions about the climate requires an enormous amount of computational power because of all of the variables, such as temperature, wind, pressure, and humidity,' said Dr. Mark Tadross, lead researcher.

'By using World Community Grid, we have the computational power necessary to run the tests we need to improve our models.'