Postdoctoral researcher on high-resolution climate modelling
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 900 staff from 55 countries.
Homepage: https://www.bsc.es/
Climate: Past, Present & Future (CL)
Ocean Sciences (OS)
Context And Mission
The Earth Sciences Department of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-ES) led by Prof Francisco Doblas-Reyes develops, among other research tools, global climate models to perform a range of climate experiments at frontier (storm and eddy-resolving) spatial resolutions. The Department is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to assist in the development and analysis of the high-resolution global simulations with the IFS/NEMO climate model.
The position offered is funded by the European projects EERIE and EXPECT, and involves (1) providing scientific feedback to improve the physical soundness of a Digital Twin based on IFS-NEMO developed at the BSC within the Destination Earth initiative, (2) leading the production of cutting edge simulations with an eddy-resolving version of IFS-NEMO, and (3) contributing to their scientific analysis with a specific focus on the impact of ocean eddies on the local air-sea interactions, their influence on the atmospheric circulation and their ultimate impact on extreme events.
Key Duties
- Provide scientific inputs for the development of the eddy-resolving version of the model NEMO-IFS
- Performing the production experiments with this new model configuration
- Preparing and submitting supercomputing access proposals to support the production of the high resolution simulations
- Lead scientific analyses on the role of mesoscale air-sea interactions in shaping the response of the atmospheric circulation in the North Atlantic to climate change
- Conducting a process-based evaluation of the drivers of summer extremes in the NEMO-IFS simulations, with a particular focus on hydroclimate extremes
- Participate in the supervision of the junior members of the group
- Coordinate the BSC contributions to several project deliverables
Education
- PhD in atmospheric science, applied mathematics, engineering, fluid dynamics or in a related discipline
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Postdoctoral experience will be valued
- Proven ability to prepare and submit manuscripts to peer-review journals
- Experience developing experimental set ups that address specific climate modeling problems
- Experience in ocean/atmosphere modelling (or environmental modelling) and in handling climate model outputs.
- Demonstrated experience in high resolution modelling will be valued
- Programming skills: scripting (e.g. bash, python), data analysis and visualization software (e.g. CDO, NCO, R, Python, NCL)
- Experience in handling large datasets, and a minimum knowledge of NetCDF encoding
- Experience in HPC and parallel computing (multi-threaded applications)