Post-Doctoral Research Associate (Greenland Ice Sheet Change)

Fixed term until 18.08.2026 and full time at 1.0 FTE

Closing Date:   Tuesday 24 October 2023

Interview Date:   Tuesday 07 November 2023

We have an exciting opportunity for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) with experience of statistical analysis and/or modelling, and preferably some meteorology/climate and/or glaciology background, to join our growing team.

The Department of Geography at the University of Lincoln is rapidly developing its research profile in the area of climate science and has a very active Lincoln Climate Research Group. This includes a new NERC-funded 2.5-year project on the "Greenland Ice Sheet and sea level response under climate change from AD 1600 to 2100” led by Edward Hanna, Professor of Climate Science and Meteorology. As part of this role, you will have the opportunity to work directly on the project to help push back the frontiers of knowledge and understanding in the topical and high-impact area of the Greenland Ice Sheet and climate change.

The project aims to produce a novel Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance history from AD 1600-2023 and Greenland Ice Sheet mass projections to 2100 (thus fitting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change timescales), and to assess the impact on global sea-level change and Greenland Ice Sheet-climate interactions. The Lincoln component of the project will focus on deriving a novel 500-yr (AD 1600-2100) monthly high-spatial resolution GrIS surface mass balance (net snow accumulation minus surface meltwater runoff) dataset with formally constrained uncertainty, using meteorological and Bayesian modelling applied to new global climate datasets and recently collected in situ Greenland climate records for the last few centuries. The results will be combined with ice-flow modelling of Greenland Ice Sheet mass changes, carried out elsewhere in the project, in order to gain key insights into spatial/temporal patterns of surface mass balance and total mass balance and their relationship with climate drivers during AD 1600-2023, and to deduce the relative spatial and temporal contributions of surface mass balance versus ice dynamic components to mass balance and their sensitivity to ongoing climate forcing during AD 1600-2100.

The Project involves close collaboration with Co-Investigators and Partners at the Universities of Northumbria, Durham, Nottingham, and Liege (Belgium), the Geological Survey of Denmark & Greenland/GEUS (Copenhagen), and the Desert Research Institute (NV, USA).

Although this project is the primary focus, you will also have the opportunity to suggest your own ideas or topic of research to co-develop an idea that could lead to further funding. We expect the project to begin on (or as close as possible to) 19 February 2024.  

If you would like to know more about this opportunity, please contact Edward Hanna, Professor of Climate Science and Meteorology, at ehanna@lincoln.ac.uk.

Further details:

• Job Description and Person Specification

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