Postdoc position – satellite-derived cloud properties, precipitation and water vapour

Institute ‘Pierre Simon Laplace’ (IPSL), Paris, France
Closing date: 27 June 2025

Assessment and Climate Studies of satellite-derived cloud properties, precipitation and water vapour

The Institute ‘Pierre Simon Laplace’ (IPSL) is offering a contract for a postdoctoral position in climate science to carry out two activities: on one hand the evaluation of satellite-derived datasets of cloud properties, precipitation and water vapor from the European Copernicus service through coupled climate studies of these datasets; on the other hand the construction of diabatic heating fields, using a combination of different datasets and artificial neural networks, as well as their association with convective systems, within the framework of a project of the ‘Global Energy and Water Exchanges program’ (Process Evaluation Study of Upper Tropospheric Clouds and Convection; GEWEX UTCC PROES).

Activities:

  • Evaluation of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Data Store (CDS) datasets (precipitation, water vapor, cloud properties) within the specific framework of the C3S2_520 project (quality assurance/assessment, fitness-for-purpose).
  • Development of jupyter notebooks for CDS users, as example analyses and as evaluation of these climate data records.
  • Evaluation of the documents which describe these CDS products
  • Participation in project meetings (monthly progress and annual meetings)
  • Concerning the reconstruction / evaluation of the diabatic heating rate fields : adaptation of the existing programs (in python) for the colocalisation of the different data sets; reeducation of the artificial neural networks to derive the different variables (heating rates, vertical cloud extent, precipitation intensity classification); production and evaluation of these fields over the period 2003-2024

Skills:

  • Programming in python, including jupyter notebooks
  • Experience in statistical analyses and machine/deep learning methods
  • Analysis of big datasets (satellite-based data and meteorological reanalysis)
  • Experience in data assessments (in particular the quantities to study)
  • Experience with GitHub
  • Scientific knowledge in physics, in particular on the physics of the water cycle (thermodynamics, dynamics) will be appreciated to understand the project
  • Languages: English, French

Context:

Within the framework of the ECMWF Copernicus Climate Change Service, the project C3S2_520 is responsible for the assurance for Datasets in the Copernicus Climate Data Store. Within this project, IPSL has taken the responsibility to assess cloud properties, precipitation and water vapor. This work includes several tasks and needs a close cooperation within this project.
The person to be hired collaborates directly with two researchers in charge of this project at IPSL, and the office will be situated within LMD located at Sorbonne University. Regular face-to-face and video meetings will be held between the laboratories (LSCE and LMD).
The 3D description of the heating rates is undertaken within the framework of the international GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Exchanges) Programme, via the UTCC PROES project (PROcess Evaluation Study on Upper Tropospheric Clouds & Convection, https://gewex-utcc-proes.aeris-data.fr/). At present, a dataset covering the period 2003-2018 is available via this website.

Salary according to Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) standards

Contract of 20 months

Start: August 2025

Please send your application via

https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/UAR636-ALERUB-005/Default.aspx?lang=EN

 

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