Postdoctoral Researcher in Impact Attribution from Extreme Weather Events

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed term: to 30 September 2027

The Opportunity:

We seek a postdoctoral research associate (PDRA) to work on the UK NERC-funded pushing the frontiers grant “Attributable impacts from extreme weather events”. The project will develop a novel reanalysis-based system to translate recent and historical extreme weather events into warmer or cooler (‘counter-factual’) climates and examine how their meteorological consequences and impacts are changed. 

The project will be in collaboration with researchers at the University of Reading (P.I. Ed Hawkins) with the Edinburgh position focused on estimating how the impacts of recent extreme weather events would change if they had occurred in a cooler pre-industrial world (thus attributing impacts to the observed warming of the climate system), or if they were to occur in a warmer future world. The position will require the set up and operation of the attribution system which is based on the Twentieth Century Reanalysis and will consider many different types of extreme weather events, including heavy rainfall, windstorms, heatwaves and droughts, and examine the consequences of those weather events for society, including damage to property and flooding.

This post is full-time (35 hours per week), however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working. 

Your skills and attributes for success: 

• PhD in a highly quantitative subject, such as, but not limited to, meteorology, physics, earth observation
• Expertise in relevant approaches analysing weather or climate data, or data from related physical systems 
• Knowledge of scientific programming in languages such as Python, Matlab, or related computer skills
• Proven ability to work both independently and as part of a team
• Experience of disseminating findings through scientific publications and conference presentations

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