Research Software Engineer – IIASA ENERGY (ENE) Program
- on November 3, 2020
Vacancy 22/2020 – The successful candidate will join a small team of software developers working with researchers at ENE and collaborating institutions on further developing and continuously improving these tools to support energy- and climate-related research in ENE and in the wider academic community. An interest in the scientific content of the software tools – climate change and energy transition research – will help communication within the multi-disciplinary teams and developing a deeper understanding of the user needs.
BACKGROUND
The IIASA Energy (ENE) Program is one of the leading scientific research institutions in the realm of integrated assessment of climate change and the systems transition to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In addition to its own high-impact research, ENE provides a range of services to the broader research community.
Over the past few years, the open source integrated assessment modeling platform MESSAGEix[1] has been relaunched with the goal of implementing best practices both from the perspective of research (e.g., transparency, reproducibility) and collaborative software development (e.g., versioning, continuous integration). The MESSAGEix modeling platform is used at IIASA as well as by a range of collaborators with different backgrounds and skills which has led to a growing community that contributes to developing the tool[2]. In addition to the modeling platform, researchers and software developers at ENE are managing a number of open-source tools to facilitate modeling and analysis of climate change mitigation scenarios. These tools and packages are developed in an open, collaborative process implementing best practices of scientific software development. An example for a highly visible tool is the Python package pyam for scenario data analysis and visualization[3].
As part of its mission, ENE hosts dozens of interactive scenario web databases (aka Scenario Explorer). These databases form an integral part of the infrastructure for research conducted at ENE and in the wider integrated-assessment research community and they are also a key tool for dissemination of scientific insights and results. The databases are used in particular for assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and projects with research partners in the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC).For an example of our work, visit the IAMC 1.5°C Scenario Explorer[4], which is the most prominent instance of this service currently deployed; it presents the quantitative scenario data underpinning the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15). For more information on the underlying infrastructure, please refer to the documentation.[5]
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