Position at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium

The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI) is hiring a scientist for a period of 1 year in the context of a project financed by BELSPO. The project title is “Climate impact on Built Heritage CLIMPACTH” and is coordinated by KIK-IRPA (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage). More information on the project and consortium can be found here:  https://www.belspo.be/belspo/brain2-be/project_p2_en.stm. The objective of the RMI within CLIMPACTH is to design and perform urban climate projections for Belgian cities and to apply bias correction techniques.

Job Objective:

Traditionally, climate information is extracted from global or regional climate models. Those models are however too coarse to correctly model cities. At the same time, modelers rely on the use of an ensemble of different climate simulations to assess model uncertainty. Recently a new urban downscaling methodology has been developed at RMI which is computationally-cheap and aims at providing physically-consistent time series on long timescales for multiple variables. The approach combines a regional climate model at high resolution with an urban parameterization to create an urban signature database. Then this urban signature database is used to correct existing regional climate models output with an analog approach. Finally, simulations at the city scale are performed with SURFEX. However, before such data can be used in the context of impact modelling, a bias correction is required. This statistical correction aims at removing systematic errors in the output of climate models. Different bias-correction techniques already exist, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. They should, however, be carefully tailored, tested and tuned for the specific goal which, here, is buildings physics and heritage degradation modelling.

Required competences:

• A Master degree or PhD in Science in mathematics, physics or geoscience. If you obtained your degree outside the Benelux, you must also have an equivalence recognition from a foreign diploma or certificate in Flanders (NARIC) or Wallonia (CFWB).
• Experience with running SURFEX in offline mode applied to an urban environment is an advantage.
• Experience with regional climate modeling and high performance computing is an advantage.
• Good knowledge of English
• Assets include a strong background in mathematics, experience with climate data and linux systems, and knowledge of surface processes.
• An ability to work within a team and to easily communicate research at the international level

We offer:

• A full-time contract at the level of SW1 of the Federal Belgian Scientific career for 1 year.
• Reimbursement of the local public transport.
• Possibility of partial teleworking.

Contact:

If you are interested by this position, please send by email a motivation letter and a Curriculum Vitae to Béatrice Libioulle (bea@meteo.be) beforemarch 31st, 2023, and mentioning in the subject of the email the acronym of the project (CLIMPACTH).