Modeling of the Climate System


Mission

The general mission is to develop the coupling framework between the IPSL-CM climate model and the Elmer Ice Sheet model. The selected candidate will contribute to the ESM2025 H2020 project.

Working context

The selected candidate will be affected at the Institute for Environmental Geosciences (IGE), in Grenoble, in the French Alps. This is a public research institute under the affiliation of CNRS, IRD, University Grenoble Alpes, and Grenoble-INP. It brings together about 250 people, including 150 permanent members (researchers, teacher-researchers, engineers) and about a hundred contractual agents (doctoral students, postdocs, engineers and technicians). The institute also welcomes several dozen trainees and scientific visitors every year. It is spread over two sites of the Grenoble University Campus that are 5 minutes away from each other. IGE is one of the main institutes within the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG) which is a federative structure of INSU.

The selected candidate will join the CryoDyn team, which has a focus on ice dynamics and connections to the climate system, and will be supervised by Nicolas Jourdain and Pierre Mathiot.

This work will involve strong interactions and regular visits to LSCE and LMD, both part of IPSL.

Scientific context

Ice sheet dynamics had long been thought to be in quasi-steady state on centennial timescales until satellite ice sheet observations in the 1990s revealed a significant imbalance, with acceleration and thinning of important ice streams in Greenland and Antarctica. This ice mass loss is expected to accelerate in a future, warmer climate as surface melting increases and dynamical ice sheet instabilities driven by melt and collapse of floating ice shelves are triggered. Loss of mass affects not only the ice sheets themselves, but also leads to the input of significant volumes of freshwater into the ocean. The most prominent impact of this is an increase in global sea level, but the additional freshwater will have other effects, such as significantly affect the Atlantic overturning circulation and Southern Ocean stratification. None of these feedbacks are represented in state-of-the-art Earth System Models, which still assume ice sheets are currently in steady state and will remain in their current forms in all future scenarios. Interactively simulating ice sheets will also improve the realism of the projections of ice sheet contribution to sea level rise, which are very difficult to derive from “offline” simulations, with more than an order of magnitude uncertainty on ice-shelf melt rates.

The IPSL-CM model, developed at the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute (Paris) includes the NEMO ocean model and the LMDZ atmosphere model. An Antarctic configuration of the Elmer Ice Sheet model has previously been coupled to a global ocean configuration of NEMO. The remaining step to have Elmer/Ice coupled to IPSL-CM is to couple LMDZ to Elmer/Ice within the IPSL-CM coupling framework.

Activities

The selected candidate will run the IPSL-CM model with Elmer/Ice coupled to NEMO (previously developed). They will then develop the coupling interface between LMDZ and Elmer/Ice, whereby Elmer/Ice updates the ice-sheet topography seen by LMDZ and LMDZ provides the surface mass balance to Elmer/Ice. The work will first focus on the Antarctic ice sheet, then on the Greenland ice sheet. The selected candidate will produce climate simulations. The runs will be produced on the national computing infrastructures, and the engineer will adapt and optimize the codes on upcoming supercomputers. They will do regular technological survey and write documentations. The developments will be shared within the IPSL and Elmer/Ice communities, in particular through the formation of students, postdocs and other engineers. The selected candidate will participate to the ESM2025 work package discussions and meetings.

Requirements and selection criteria

The selection will be based on the following scientific and technical criteria:

  • Demonstrated experience in atmosphere or climate modelling.
  • Demonstrated experience in Fortran and Python coding.
  • Demonstrated experience in any aspect of high-performance computing.
  • Basic understanding of the climate system.
  • Demonstrated ability to work within a team.

The selection panel will also consider the gender balance of the entire research team.

Job information

  • Employer: CNRS.
  • Type of contract: fixed-term.
  • CNRS category: BAP E
  • Job Type: Expert in scientific computing (E1E45).
  • Duration of contract: 24 months.
  • Expected date of hire: between June and September 2023.
  • Work quota: Full time.
  • Required level of studies: Completed PhD or Engineering School.
  • Required experience: No experience required.
  • Gross salary: from 2580€/month to 2970€/month (depending on experience).
  • Paid leave: approximately 45 days per year.
  • Health care: France runs a statutory health insurance system providing universal coverage for its residents (Sécurité Sociale). Most residents additionally pay for a complementary private health insurance for expenses not covered by the statutory health insurance (Mutuelle).

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