Do you want to contribute to a unique project investigating high-altitude snow and rainfall in Asia’s mountain ranges? Then this opportunity might be for you!

Your job

Mountains are the water towers of the world. They receive a disproportionately large amount of precipitation due to orographic lifting. The most important water towers are Asia’s mountain ranges, particularly the Himalaya, the Karakoram and the Pamir. These mountains contain the largest ice reserves beyond the polar regions and are therefore often collectively referred to as the Third Pole.

Here, mountain precipitation feeds glaciers and snowpacks, generating river flow that supplies major reservoirs and sustains millions of people downstream. At the same time, extreme mountain precipitation triggers floods, landslides, debris flows, and avalanches. Without understanding the drivers and magnitude of mountain precipitation, quantifying the mountain water cycle is virtually impossible. You will work as a team member in the ERC Advanced project DROP, which focuses on understanding how mountains, land-surface feedback, and large-scale atmospheric circulation control the distribution of mountain precipitation in time and space on the Third Pole.

In this four-year postdoc project, you will focus on understanding land surface feedbacks on (extreme) mountain precipitation on the Third Pole. You will set up a unique nested high-resolution atmospheric model for a historical 30-year period and evaluate the model using various observed datasets. With the model, you will use moisture tracking to assess the source regions of mountain precipitation, conduct experiments to evaluate land-surface feedbacks on mountain rain and snowfall, and analyze changes in extreme precipitation. You will work closely with two PhD candidates in the same project.

Your qualities

This project may be the right fit for you if you have:

• a PhD in meteorology, hydrology, atmospheric sciences, earth sciences, or a related field;
• experience with atmospheric modelling, preferably with the WRF model;
• experience with programming languages (Python/R), ideally using spatial datasets;
• experience with high-performance computing;
• prior knowledge in handling large-scale (atmospheric) datasets, and enthusiasm for working with large datasets and models;
• a sound theoretical understanding of mountain meteorology;
• an interest in interdisciplinary collaborations and motivation to work in a close team;
• excellent English oral and scientific writing skills, and a willingness to learn Dutch.