Research Associate / Senior Research Associate - Paleoclimate Modeller for Super-Warm Climates

The University of Bristol is looking to appoint a Paleoclimate Modeller for Super-Warm Climates, Research Associate or Senior Research Associate.

In order to predict the sociological, environmental, and economic impacts of future climate change, the only tool at our disposal is climate modelling.  However, our state-of-the-art climate models are almost never tested under the high CO2, super-warm climate conditions to which they are primarily applied, and upon which major policy decisions are made.

However, there exist time periods in Earth's deep past (for example the Eocene, about 50 million years ago) when CO2 concentrations were similar to those expected by the end of this century.  The SWEET project, of which this postdoc position forms an important part, presents an exciting opportunity to provide a much-needed evaluation of our very latest climate models in a super-warm world, using novel climate modelling and geochemical techniques and analysis. 

The Research Associate /Senior Research Associate will primarily be responsible for configuring, running, analysing, and publishing climate model simulations of the early Eocene time period, using the HadCM3 and UKESM models.  They will collaborate strongly with the other project partners, in particular to carry out model-data comparisons in order to evaluate the performance of the model in a high-CO2 world.  The exact details of the work can be found in the SWEET project proposal, which is available on request from the Principal Investigator of SWEET, Prof Dan Lunt, to whom informal enquiries should also be made (d.j.lunt@bristol.ac.uk).  

UKESM, is identical to that being used by the UK Met Office in the international 'CMIP6' project, which itself will be the primary input to the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.

The SWEET project (www.deepmip.org/sweet) has strong links to UK Met Office, and to the international DeepMIP project (www.deepmip.org), which is part of the 'Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project', itself part of CMIP6. We expect our results to feed into the next IPCC assessment reports and therefore to ultimately inform policy.

Further information

The closing date for applications will be 23:59 on Thursday 31st January 2019. 

We appreciate and value difference, seeking to attract, develop and retain a diverse mix of talented people that will contribute to the overall success of Bristol and help maintain our position as one of the world's leading universities.