Scientist Tipping Points
Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, The Netherlands
Closing date: 27 March 2025
You will work together with Prof. Sybren Drijfhout on the detection and analysis of regime shifts, abrupt climate change, tipping points and early warning signals in future climate change simulations (including overshoot scenarios in terms of global warming), performed by state-of-the-art earth system models by applying, improving and extending existing search and detection algorithms.
Part of this work has already been performed by a postdoc leaving after 2 years and Sybren Drijfhout. You will work with python scripts that were developed in the project, tailor them to new variables to be investigated and work together with Sybren Drijfhout on making a catalogue on tipping points in the vegetation/carbon system in addition to the already (nearly) completed catalogue on the ocean-atmosphere-sea-ice system.
In addition, Sybren Drijfhout and the postdoc are working with international experts on high-profile papers on the increased risk of collapse of the AMOC (Gulfstream) and disappearance of year-round Arctic sea-ice. The new postdoc will contribute to another paper on the impacts of an AMOC collapse for Western Europe and further research into precursors of AMOC Tipping, focusing on the collapse of deep (convective) mixing in the northern North Atlantic/Arctic oceans. These analyses will be performed in collaboration with partners from a.o. the University of Exeter, the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.