Water systems around the world are confronted with increasing variability. In many places the frequency and intensity of extreme events, droughts and floods, are increasing and will probably continue to increase with projected climate change. Water managers who need to balance water demand and availability and who need to protect society's assets to potentially damaging water surpluses, would benefit greatly from information systems that provide early warning of future hydro-meteorological anomalies.
Continuing advances in medium range meteorological forecasting and more recent advances in seasonal predictions can provide probabilistic information on near future precipitation and temperatures with useful skill for increasingly larger fractions of the world and with longer lead times. Memory effects in the water systems itself improve and extend such forecast skills even more for runoff and river discharge, soil moisture and groundwater or e.g. reservoir inflow. The post doc position offered will work on further improvement of seasonal hydrological forecast systems in relation to agricultural water management.
The Water Systems and Global Change group (www.wur.nl/wsg )of Wageningen University & Research (WSG) has built up a considerable track record in studying interactions between hydrology, land cover and land use, and climate variability and change. We do this in the context of developing climate services that help water managers to deal with 'too little or too much' water. The post doc will contribute to this research line in the context of the CLIMAX project, which aims to develop seasonal hydrological and crop forecasts, especially for (south-eastern) South America.
As a Post-Doc you will work on the following research topics
- Implement, validate and calibrate large scale hydrological (and crop) models for South America, in particular VIC and LPJmL.
- Setup a workflow for seasonal hydrological (and crop) forecasting producing hindcast and actual forecasts of the same.
- Analyse spatio-temporal patterns of predictive skill, and investigate the sources of such skill through appropriate EPS type model experiments.
The work will consist of relevant literature research, setting up and analysing model simulations in a HPC environment, and publish your results in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and participate with stakeholders and developers in translating seasonal forecasts into communication services. You will be member of a larger team of researcher in this field within and outside of WSG, and have particular strong interactions with the CLIMAX consortium, consisting of various partners in Europe, Brazil and Argentina, and their stakeholders.