PhD position on Antarctic Climate Causality > Joboolo BE :
Société : KU Leuven Lieu : Leuven Flanders Site source : Talent BE
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean play a key role in the Earth's climate system, influencing global heat balance and carbon uptake.
Recent anomalies, including a drastic sea ice decline, anomalous snowfall, and unprecedented heat waves, challenge our understanding of the region's response to climate change.
This project aims at an improved understanding of recent changes occurring in the Antarcticclimate by investigating the interconnections between the ice sheet surface mass balance (SMB), sea ice, ocean temperature, and ice shelf melt, utilizing observations and a recently developed fully coupled ice-sheet–ocean–sea-ice–atmosphere–land model, PARASO, covering Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
The interactions between climate components cover both direct links and indirect links due to varying large-scale atmospheric processes.
The methodology integrates observations and simulations, employing causal frameworks to identify relationships.
The work packages involve identifying links between atmospheric circulation, sea ice, and SMB variability from observations (WP1), unravelling the role of large-scale atmospheric variability (WP2), exploring potential feedbacks related to sea ice changes (WP3), and synthesizing contributions to recent and future climate changes (WP4).
By employing advanced causal inference methods, the project strives to overcome challenges in attributing causality from observational data.
In a complementary way, the PARASO model allows for a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between different components that cannot be identified from observations alone.
Moreover, the model will be used for future Antarcticclimate projections.
This proposal's outcomes will advance our understanding of recent Antarcticclimate changes and their interlinkage, offering insights into the future of the coupled Antarcticclimate system.A consortium of UCLouvain and KU Leuven is seeking a PhD student to work in the framework of the ACCU project (AntarcticClimateCausality:
Unraveling links between the components of the system and their variability).
You will be working in three groups with complementary expertise.
The group of Prof.
Hugues Goosse is specialized in analyzing changes in the sea ice -ocean system, using a variety of tools and models, in particular the ice-ocean model NEMO that will be applied in ACCU.
The group of Prof.
Nicole van Lipzig has expertise in atmospheric processes.
They develop and employ regional climate models to study climate change processes in different regions of the world including Antarctica.The team of Prof.
Stef Lhermitte works on methods (e.g., remote sensing machine learning) for quantifying the effect of climate (change) on snow/ice, vegetation dynamics, etc.
and determine their (climate) feedbacks.PhD Candidate, expected to obtain a joint PhD of UCLouvain and KU Leuven;Starting date preferably 1 October 2024;Full time position for 48 months of which the first 24 months at KU Leuven and the second 24 months at UC Louvain;Location:
Department Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium and Earth and Life Institute, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Net monthly salary of about 2400 €, depending on personal situation.
This includes social insurance.
Transportation to and from the workplace is covered;Contribution to educational activities is expected for about 10% of your time. KU Leuven LeuvenFlanders
