PhD position

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has a three year PhD–position vacant on the development and application of atmospheric dispersion models to be used in case of nuclear emergencies. The new position will be a part of the Division for Climate Modelling and Air Pollution within the Research and Development Department. Nationally and internationally, the division is among the leading groups for Climate Modelling and Air Pollution. An important focus area for the division, and of the institute, is on implementing research results into services that are relevant to our collaboration partners and to the society.

The PhD position is co-financed with the Centre for Environmental Radioactivity / Centre of Excellence (CERAD), established at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in collaboration between Norwegian Radiation Protection Agency, the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI) and the Meteorological Institute. The mission of CERAD is to provide new scientific knowledge and tools for better protection of people and the environment from harmful effects of radiation.

The main aim of this PhD project is to improve the capabilities to model the transport  of radioactive material in the atmosphere. This includes application, evaluation and further development of existing atmospheric dispersion models for use in radioactive emergencies. The PhD position is linked to NMBU, and the PhD candidate will be supervised by atmospheric transport modelers at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) and by a main supervisor at CERAD, NMBU. The candidate  will also work closely with other national and international CERAD partners.

Main tasks

• comparison and evaluation of atmospheric dispersion models for use in radioactive emergencies
• assessment of historic or hypothetical nuclear accidents
• adaptation to ensemble forecasting and nowcasting
• inverse modelling
• Computer skills are highly relevant, both for model development (currently Fortran), accessing high volumes of data and plotting of informative graphs.

In collaboration with supervisors, the successful candidate is expected to prepare a work and research plan for the PhD scholarship period within the first few months of the appointment.

Preferred qualifications
The successful applicant must have a MS degree in meteorology, geophysics, physics, mathematics or computer science, which is preferably obtained within the last 5 years. The applicant should have documented experience in scientific programming and be familiar with working in High Performance Computing environments or Big Data environments. It is an advantage if the new scientist is familiar with UNIX/LINUX, python, FORTRAN-90, version control, web services, handling of binary data formats, (e.g. grib, netcdf, hdf) and has experience with parallelization and optimization routines.

Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria

• the MSc degree grades
• competence in scientific programming
• experience within atmospheric modelling
• dissemination skills

In addition, the candidate must have

• proficient in English - both written and oral
• good communication skills, both related to research and presentations in general

Personal characteristics important for the position are

• strong motivation
• creativity and ability to work result-oriented, accurate and structured
• analytical ability, ability to work independently as well as ability to be a good team player
• willingness to learn Norwegian

Conditions

• salary as scientist on the governmental salary scales, NOK 449.400 - 497.000 pr. year,  dependent on qualifications and experience
• membership in the governmental pension scheme (2% deducted from gross salary)
• the first 6 months is a mutual trial period

It is an aim that the composition of the staff at the Norwegian Meteorological institute shall reflect the composition of the population at large both in terms of gender and cultural background.

For more details, contact Head of Division Hilde Fagerli (ph +47 920 26 597) or Director of Research Lars-Anders Breivik (ph +47 917 50 623).

The application must be submitted electronically: met.no.

Please attach CV, list of publications and the names of two references