The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has a three year PhD–position vacant in the Division for Climate Modelling and Air Pollution within the Research and Development Department.

The research on climate and earth system processes at MET Norway is centered around the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) and the contribution to CMIP model intercomparisons and their analysis. The NorESM model is developed and applied in a national partnership in particular with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen (BCCR) and the Department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo. The NorESM work at MET Norway, with partners, has been evaluated as outstanding by an international evaluation committee appointed by the Norwegian Research Council.

The PhD project shall focus on effective constraints for climate sensitivity with the help of observations and the NorESM earth system model. Focus will be on analysis of temperature trends, historical aerosol forcing estimates and their feedback strengths Climate sensitivity has enormous consequences for the water cycle and is interconnected with its strength and details. Constraints to be explored come from significant hemispheric differences in aerosol forcing, a likely maximum in the 70ties of the aerosol forcing and presumably little changes in aerosol forcing in the well observed satellite period after 1995. Further an increasing amount of sediment and ice core data on aerosol composition and its historical evolution will be used. Analysis will be based on good understanding of NorESM feedback mechanisms.

Main tasks

· assemble relevant observational datasets and prepare for comparison

· analyze feedback strengths and mechanisms in NorESM and CMIP6 models

· prepare and perform a perturbed set of historical NorESM simulations

· compare NorESM and observed historical data trends

· explore from perturbed model ensemble resultant uncertainty in water cycle

Preferred qualifications

· master-degree in meteorology, geophysics, physics, mathematics or computer science

· documented experience in scientific programming

· familiar with working in High Performance Computing environments or Big Data environments

· it is an advantage if the new scientist is familiar with UNIX/LINUX, python, FORTRAN-90, version control, web services, handling of binary data formats, (e.g. grib, netcdf, hdf ) and has experience with parallelization and optimization routines

· it is an advantage if the new scientist is familiar with climate model operation, eg NorESM, CESM

· applicants must be proficient in English, both written and spoken

Personal skills

· ability to work independently, take initiative, and work problem oriented

· analytic ability and academic approach to research

· ability to work in a research group

Conditions

· salary as scientist on the governmental salary scales, NOK 449.400 - 497.000 pr. year, dependent on qualifications and experience

· membership in the governmental pension scheme (2% deducted from gross salary)

· the first 6 months is a mutual trial period

It is an aim that the composition of the staff at the Norwegian Meteorological institute shall reflect the composition of the population at large both in terms of gender and cultural background.

For more details, contact Head of Division Hilde Fagerli (ph +47 920 26 597), Deputy Head of Division Michael Schulz (ph +47 984 71 672) or Director of Research Lars-Anders Breivik (ph +47 917 50 623).

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