Postdoctoral position – researcher in Terrestrial Systems Modelling

There is an open postdoctoral position (30 months) at the Environmental Research and Innovation Department (ERIN) of Luxembourg institute of science and technology in Belvaux.

Description

The postdoctoral researcher will be involved in the framework of the CAPACITY (ClimAte and Plant hydrAulics Controls on drought predIction uncertainty in a new-generation Terrestrial sYstem model) project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). The project will tackle the challenges of investigating the controls of plant hydraulic traits on the drought predictive uncertainties across different ecosystems, regions, and the entire European continent under past and future climatic conditions. The CAPACITY project will make joint use of the most recent version of the Community Land Model (CLM5.0) and multi-source observations, exploit globally assembled and continuously updated databases of plant traits, and extract past and future climate signals from multi-model ensemble atmospheric simulations. The researcher will be incorporated in the Agro-Environmental Systems group of the Environmental Sensing and Modelling (ENVISION) RDI unit and will collaborate with scientists in other groups on topics related to remote sensing and plant ecophysiology.

Main missions

The postdoctoral researcher will play a central role in the project and its outputs. Her/his main mission is to perform regional- and continental-scale CLM5.0 simulations over Europe for seasonal and decadal time periods. In addition, the candidate will be asked to exploit information from a wide range of in-situ (e.g., FLUXNET and SAPFLUXNET) and remotely sensed (e.g., ESA-CCI soil moisture, MODIS Land Surface Temperature, and Sun-Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence) datasets to establish complementarity between the land surface modelling and remote sensing.   

Profile

Education

• PhD degree in Earth Science, Ecosystem Modelling, Hydrology, Meteorology or Climate Sciences or a related discipline

Required seniority

• PhD is necessary, one or two years of postdoctoral experience is an advantage

Competencies

• Demonstrated technical skills with different programming languages (e.g., Fortran, Python, R, Matlab) and shell scripting
• Experience with Linux-based systems, high performance computing and handling of large datasets is of clear advantage
• Knowledge of and experience with the Community Land Model (CLM5.0) would be considered as a strong asset

Language

• Fluent in English (written and oral)
• Knowledge in at least one of the official languages of Luxembourg (French, German or Luxembourgish) is an asset