Computing Climates: Global Networks and Scientific Assemblages

The enumeration of planetary climate through the apparatus of climate science and climate modelling is reliant on a select number of computational centres globally. The U.K Meteorological Office is one such contributor to global climate science through the Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, as a climate modelling centre feeding into the IPCC and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) of the WCRP. This paper examines the role of the supercomputer as the foundational instrument in the institutions of contemporary climate science, bringing climate into being primarily in silico as a virtual representation (Hulme, 2017: 1). The U.K Met Office hosts arguably the “world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to weather and climate” in a connected set of data halls which house three Cray XC40 systems (Met Office, 2021). Yet to support this knowledge production through high performance computing, a complex building infrastructure and sociotechnical organisation is required.
Examining the spatial, occupational and technological disposition at the Met Office Headquarters and the ancillary new High Performance Computer facility, I explore the definition of climate - an often nebulous and multitudinous term- and seek to answer the question: where is climate situated? Is it truly an unfolding long-term pattern of physical atmospheric phenomena, or is it more accurately an act of mediation that is brought into being by the various, yet interconnected, supercomputing centres of climate science? In challenging the conventional notions of weather and climate as part of the false nature-culture dichotomy that has prevailed in modern thinking surrounding scientific epistemologies, I believe the locus of climate, and its attendant simulacrum the climate model, shifts from the exterior to the interior environment.