3-years postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, Swiss

The first year will be mostly spent in the LCD, and the last two years in the WCR group.

The candidate should ideally begin between October 2023 and February 2024, and the position is for 3 years.

This position is part of the EU-horizon research project Socioeconomic Pathways, Adaptation, and Resilience to a Changing CLimate in Europe (SPARCCLE) that aims to deliver climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. The advertised position is to be conducted within the WCR and LCD groups at ETH Zürich, and as such integrates within the larger research program on investigating risks of extreme weather events in current and future climates.

The Weather and Climate Risks group is led by Prof. David N. Bresch at the Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED) with a double affiliation at the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss). The Group works on analyzing risk of extreme weather events for all socially relevant aspects (e.g., risk for critical infrastructures, displaced people, work productivity, …), and how these will change in the future. In particular, the role of climate change, and the opportunities of adaptation strategies to reduce future risks are investigated. To this effect, the group is actively developing and using CLIMADA (CLImate ADAptation), a fully open-source climate risk modelling and adaptation options appraisal platform written in Python.

The Land-Climate Dynamics group is led by Prof. Sonia I. Seneviratne at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC). The LCD group focusses on land-climate interactions and feedbacks, and changes in climate extremes such as heatwaves, droughts and heavy precipitation, with research streams emphasizing climate modelling, observational assessments, and process analysis. The LCD group is actively developing and using the Modular Earth System Model Emulator with spatially Resolved output (MESMER) which is designed to approximate Earth System dynamics simulations using statistical tools, including for climate extremes.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the LCD and WCR group you will conduct research at the interface between climate and climate-risk modelling. To this end you will use state-of-the-art tools to statistically emulate climate extreme indicators which are fed into a risk modeling platform to study the impact of extreme climate events on global ecosystems.

The main tasks are three-fold:

1. Get familiar with the climate emulator MESMER and the CLIMADA platform, develop interfaces between the two tools, and further develop relevant emulator capabilities.
2. Use the new modelling capabilities to quantify the impact of extreme weather in a changing climate on the functioning of global ecosystems.
3. Get involved with the EU-project partners wherever relevant.