Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) / ESCER Centre

The ESCER Centre (Centre pour l'étude et la simulation du climat à l'échelle régionale) is a research group in UQAM which focuses on the observation and simulation of weather and climate phenomena as well as on atmospheric physics. This research group is very dynamic and it is located downtown Montreal (Quartier des spectacles).

Homepage: https://escer.uqam.ca/

The specific theme of the project is the development and evaluation of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for cloud scene classification. The project is funded mostly by the programme "Research opportunities in HAWC suborbital, science, and application development activities (ROHSSA)" of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), in link with the Canadian HAWC (High-altitude Aerosols, Water vapour and Clouds) mission which will lead to the launch of three satellite instruments around 2032, namely the ALI, SHOW and TICFIRE instruments (for general informations, see : https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/hawc/).

More precisely, data from the FIRR-2 radiometer, a precursor of the upcoming TICFIRE instrument, will be used to develop a CNN-based cloud classifier. FIRR-2 is a radiometer measuring radiances in 8 thermal infrared and far infrared bands, and it collected data during the recent WHAFFFERS and PONEX airborne campaigns. These data as well as auxiliary data will be used to explore the potential added value of CNN-based cloud classification as compared with a more traditional threshold-based classification algorithm.

Interested students may send an e-mail [grenier.patrick@uqam.ca] to Patrick Grenier, professor at the Department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Montréal, Canada. An application e-mail should contain the following documents, in PDF format :

- Curriculum vitae ;

- University transcripts ;

- Letter of motivation.

Applications can be made in French or in English (a French version of the offer is advertised on UQAM's ESCER center website : https://escer.uqam.ca/appel-a-candidatures/).

Applications will be reviewed as received and the position will remain open until it is filled. The ideal starting date is September 2026.