A two-day international meeting of climate-prediction experts gets under way in Dublin today.
The meeting, which is being hosted at UCD, forms part of the EC-Earth programme, an international collaborative project aiming to simulate and predict the entire global climate system.
The programme plans to develop a computer model that will improve predictions of global climate for the rest of this century and beyond. In addition to the earth's atmosphere, the model will incorporate factors relating to the ocean, land, and ice.
Modules for marine and terrestrial biogeochemical cycles will be included later.
Met Éireann, UCD and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing are the Irish partners in the project.
Minister for the Environment John Gormley said: "Programmes such as EC-EARTH are absolutely essential if we are to predict the global climate conditions with accuracy.
"We also want to expand the links to international research to ensure that Ireland has an advanced capability for predicting future climate conditions," he added.