Researcher in Modeling of aerosols, cold clouds and climate
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Closing date: 16 April 2024
Clouds largely determine the Earth’s radiation budget and hence also the climate. Any changes in their properties, which depend on aerosol conditions of chemistry and loading, can reinforce or offset any climate change. In fact, most of the uncertainty about how much global warming will occur in future, for a given emissions scenario of greenhouse gases, is linked to issues of how to represent clouds in numerical climate models.
Most of the volume of the troposphere is subzero. There any clouds at least partly consist of ice. There has been controversy about initiation of ice in clouds, especially regarding the identity of aerosol species (‘ice nuclei’) initiating the first ice and whether their action is appreciably time dependent.
This project aims to simulate the effects from time-dependent activity of ice nucleus aerosols and to investigate the climate impact from anthropogenic changes in their loadings.. We have represented ice initiation in the cloud schemes of a global model using more accurate treatment of microphysical processes, informed by our lab data. This is part of a collaboration between atmospheric modelers in Sweden at Lund, in USA and in Norway at Oslo.
A researcher position for one year is to be filled in the project.
Work duties
The main duties will involve doing research by numerical modelling. The researcher will further develop some microphysics schemes in the stratiform and convective cloud parameterizations of a global model. Satellite and other observations will be collected to verify the accuracy of the global model developments. Impacts on the global climate from anthropogenic changes in ice-nucleating aerosols are to be evaluated.
This will involve coding with FORTRAN 90 in a linux environment. The work will be performed in a team of atmospheric modellers at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science.