[Wrf-users] PhD Grant Applications at the Earth Science Division of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

[Carlos Perez]

Dear colleagues,

We send you two PhD offers in meteorology and mineral dust modeling in 
the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Please forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested.

Thanks, best regards

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Dr. Carlos Pérez García-Pando
Earth Sciences Division
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación
Edificio Nexus II
c/ Jordi Girona 29, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
phone +34 934134050 fax +34 933340255
mail to: carlos.perez at bsc.es
BSC web page: http://www.bsc.es
Daily DREAM mineral dust model forecasts for the Euro-Mediterranean and East-Asian regions: 
http://www.bsc.es/projects/earthscience/DREAM/ 
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*Call for PhD Grant Applications at the Earth Science Division of the 
Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación*.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de 
Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the National Supercomputer Facility in 
Spain, one of the most powerful Supercomputers in the world. The mission 
of BSC is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in 
order to facilitate scientific progress. With this objective, it has 
been taken special dedication to areas such as Deep Computing and 
e-sciences. The Earth Sciences Division of the BSC-CNS has as main 
topics of research: air quality (photochemical and aerosol pollution); 
climate change (feedback with air quality and radiative forcing); and 
global and regional modelling of desert dust.

We invite applications from young scientists with outstanding 
qualifications from the national and international community to join us 
as PhD students. We encourage applications from highly motivated 
individuals, with computational skills and background in meteorology, 
air quality and/or climate modelling who wish to do their PhD in a 
stimulating environment, rich in technological resources.

*Positions offered: *

*Numerical Weather Prediction – High resolution forecasting:*
The successful candidate will contribute to develop a specific 
methodology to initialize a non-hydrostatic high-resolution mesoscale 
meteorological model for an air quality forecasting system over the 
Iberian Peninsula and near regions. The land-atmosphere interactions 
will be a main topic of research for the improvement of meteorological 
forecasts. Land surfaces are typically heterogeneous, leading to 
significant horizontal variations on the surface energy budget. A 
correct initialization of land surface schemes may lead to an 
enhancement of the meteorological model results. WRF mesoscale modeling 
system will be used and 3DVar packages as ADAS will be applied to 
improve high-resolution meteorological modeling over the Iberian 
Peninsula. The use of satellite data will be explored for a better 
land-surface and soil characterization.


*Mineral dust atmospheric modelling:*
Succesful PhD candidate will contribute to develop, improve, validate 
and implement the DREAM (http://www.bsc.es/projects/earthscience/DREAM/) 
dust model for accurate simulation/forecast of the dust process. This 
will be achieved through the implementation state-of-the-art numerical 
modelling methods and addition of new parameterizations for the 
following physical processes: dust emission, dust particle size physics, 
radiative effects of mineral dust, and dust-clouds microphysics. The 
dust model computational efficiency will be improved by introducing a 
parallelised and non-hydrostatic version of the atmospheric model driver 
(WRF-NMM) in order to increase model’s spatial and temporal resolution 
for operational use in different emission areas of the globe.

Participants will be selected on a competitive basis. Fellowships will 
be assigned for one year period (12 months) and may be extended up to 3 
years (48 months in total). Salary follows the rules from the Spanish 
National Fellowships. All applicants should be familiar with F77/F90 
programming under a Linux environment, and have good english skills. 
Spanish would be also appreciated.

To apply, please submit a curriculum vitae, copy of the academic degree 
and contact information of two references. If you are interested please 
send your application not later than 15 September 2006 to:

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación
Earth Science Division
C/Jordi Girona 29
08034 Barcelona (Spain)

Dr. Oriol Jorba oriol.jorba at bsc.es
Dr. Carlos Pérez carlos.perez at bsc.es
Dr. José María Baldasano

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