PhD opportunity: Antropogenic influences on East African high impact rainfall
KU leuven
KU Leuven is an international community where innovative research forms the basis of all our academic programmes. Across the university, driven researchers and curious students continually gain new insights and use their knowledge to tackle the foremost challenges of our time.
Homepage: https://ees.kuleuven.be/
Climate: Past, Present & Future (CL)
Extreme rainfall, floods, landslides and heat stress already affect millions across East Africa. Reliable projections that explicitly account for different climate forcings are crucial for understanding our future climate. To obtain such projections, you use the next-generation regional climate model ICON‑CLM to run convection‑permitting simulations (≈2.2 km) over Equatorial East Africa. By transitioning to kilometer-scale modeling, this research overcomes the limitations of coarse-scale simulations that often struggle with East Africa’s complex terrain and lake-breeze dynamics. The project goes beyond existing global warming projections by adding the regional impact of rapid urbanization and associated shifting aerosol levels. In this way, you provide an understanding and assessment of how these interacting factors reshape regional convective systems and high-impact weather A dedicated computer scientist/software engineer works alongside you to set up ICON-CLM on the HPC systems, support simulations and manage large data volumes—so you can focus on the science. Your work generates open datasets and insights that directly benefit African stakeholders and the wider research community.