Research Fellow in Convection over the Maritime Continent

Do you have a background in convection, tropical meteorology, dynamical meteorology, weather forecasting, or a related field?

Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research intensive Universities?

An exciting opportunity has arisen to observe, quantify and model the atmospheric processes that govern the generation of precipitation, weather and climate systems over Indonesia and the wider Maritime Continent.Supervised by Dr Cathryn Birch, Dr Juliane Schwendike and Dr John Marsham, you will conduct novel and fundamental research into high-impact severe convective storms over the Western Maritime Continent. You will characterise the diurnal cycle of precipitation, cloud and convection using novel observations from the Years of Maritime Continent project, a major international field and modelling initiative. You will improve understanding of the relative importance of key processes causing the triggering, propagation and organisation of convection in the complex environment of the Western Maritime Continent. Further you will diagnose key deficiencies in weather and climate models through process-based model evaluation and comparison of models of differing complexity (from convective-scale to global). Additionally, you will analyse and quantify the relative importance of low-frequency modulations of the background state (i.e. variations in environmental winds, vertical motion, stability humidity and clouds through phenomena such as the MJO and equatorial waves) within the storm lifecycle and for model biases in the Maritime Continent. The position is available through the NERC-funded UK consortium project “TerraMaris” and the Weather and Climate for Science Services Partnership (WCSSP) Southeast Asia project, funded through the Met Office Newton Fund. You will participate in a major atmospheric-oceanographic field campaign in Java, Indonesia and Christmas Island, Australia in 2020. You will work closely with project partners at the Met Office, BMKG (Indonesian Met Service), Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Meteorological Service Singapore, University of East Anglia (UK), University of Reading and Monash University (Australia).

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact: 

Dr Cathryn Birch, University Academic Fellow

Tel: +44 (0)113 343 9831, email: c.e.birch@leeds.ac.uk