PhD position in AI-based prediction and climate change attribution of extreme events
Institute of Geociencies, CSIC-UCM
CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) is the largest public research institution in Spain and the third one in Europe. It plays a key role in scientific and technological policy in Spain by carrying out research in all fields of knowledge. CSIC produces ~20% of the national scientific output and is liste the 1st organization in Spain, the 3rd in H2020 (917 projects) and the 2nd in Horizon Europe (612 projects). It is also a main actor in the ERC programme (161 projects signed as Host Institution), the EIT’s, KIC’s, and International Programmes like LIFE and INTERREG. CSIC coordinates key infrastructures (ESFRI, EOSC), promotes Open Science, and holds the HR Excellence in Research award.
The successful candidate will join the Instituto de Geociencias (IGEO, Madrid), a Joint Research Center of CSIC and UCM. IGEO gathers employees and resources from both institutions and carries out cutting-edge multidisciplinary research in different topics related to climate. This multidisciplinary character embraces the study of the Earth System, from the core to the stratosphere, in order to solve scientific problems in Earth Sciences within the framework of scientific collaborations with other research organizations and industry, at both national and international levels.
Homepage: https://www.igeo.ucm-csic.es/
Climate: Past, Present & Future (CL)
Natural Hazards (NH)
The Physics of Climate and Climate Change group at the Instituto de Geociencias (IGEO, CSIC–UCM) in Madrid invites applications for a:
PhD researcher, 100%
to join the project ADAPT-X – AI-Driven AnticiPated aTtribution of eXtreme events (ref. 2025-T1/ECO-36122), funded by the Comunidad de Madrid through the César Nombela Talent Attraction Programme.
The position is offered for 4 years, starting in Spring 2027 or as soon as possible thereafter.
ADAPT-X investigates how AI-based weather prediction models can be used to improve the prediction and climate-change attribution of extreme events such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts and severe storms. Recent AI weather models can produce skilful global forecasts at a fraction of the computational cost of conventional numerical weather prediction systems, opening new possibilities for large forecast ensembles and event-based climate attribution.
The PhD researcher will evaluate the predictive skill of AI weather models for extreme events and examine how well they represent the atmospheric processes associated with them. The work will include factual and counterfactual forecast experiments, in which AI models are initialized under present-day and pre-industrial climate conditions to quantify the influence of anthropogenic climate change on individual events.
The candidate will also investigate how the imposed climate-change signal evolves during the forecast, assess the physical consistency of the resulting response using dynamical and thermodynamic diagnostics, and compare AI-based attribution with physics-based numerical weather prediction simulations, including NWP experiments for selected events.
The successful candidate will join the Physics of Climate and Climate Change group at IGEO-CSIC and the STREAM research group at UCM, with access to GPU and high-performance computing resources and opportunities for international collaboration and research stays.
Requirements: Applicants should hold, or be close to completing, a Master’s degree giving access to a PhD programme in atmospheric sciences, meteorology, climate science, physics, applied mathematics, environmental sciences, computer science, data science, or a related quantitative field. Good scientific programming skills, particularly in Python, are required. Experience with atmospheric dynamics, numerical modelling, machine learning, or large meteorological datasets would be advantageous.
Full description of the offer here: https://bernatj.github.io/assets/pdf/PhD_offer_ADAPTX.pdf
Applications and deadline: Please send a single PDF including (i) CV, (ii) a one-page motivation letter, (iii) academic transcripts, and (iv) contact details of two potential referees to bernatji@ucm.es, with the subject “ADAPT-X PhD application – [Candidate name]”, by 31 December 2026.
IGEO-CSIC is committed to a policy of providing equal employment opportunities for both men and women alike, and therefore encourages particularly women to apply for the two positions offered.