• Are you a highly motivated recent (or near) PhD graduate with expertise in climate sciences, meteorology or oceanography?
• Prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship on offer – kick-start your research career
• Join CSIRO’s Ocean & Atmosphere world leading team of researchers

The Position
Postdoctoral Fellowships at CSIRO provide opportunities to scientists and engineers, who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships will help launch their careers, provide experience that will enhance their career prospects, and facilitate the recruitment and development of potential leaders for CSIRO.

This position will contribute to the CSIRO Decadal climate forecast project team by investigating coupled ocean-atmosphere dynamics at various time scales. There remain many unanswered fundamental questions on air-sea dynamics that result in ocean variance with the potential to remain coherent on the multi-year to -decadal time scale, and how these anomalous ocean signals re-emerge at the ocean-atmosphere boundary. Working out how the ocean drives the low frequency variability of the tropical and mid-latitude atmospheric circulation is still very much an open question, but one of utmost importance in understanding potential predictability of the climate system.

You will use various models and observations to study ocean-atmospheric coupling processes with the potential to provide climate predictability. The goal of this work is to provide a more complete understanding of the fundamental dynamics of ocean-atmosphere coupling that will lead to more reliable and skilful multi-year to decadal climate forecast.

Your duties will include:

• Under the supervision of Dr Bernadette Sloyan and Dr James Risbey carry out fundamental and innovative research investigating using the CSIRO Decadal Climate Forecasting system and observations to explore and understand key dynamics of ocean-atmosphere coupling that results in climate predictability on multi-year time scales.
• Produce high quality scientific and/or engineering papers suitable for publication in quality journals, for client reports and granting of patents.
• Prepare appropriate conference papers and present those at conferences as agreed with your supervisor.

To be successful you will need:

• A doctorate (or will shortly satisfy the requirements of a PhD) in a relevant discipline area, such as oceanography, meteorology, climate science.
• Demonstrated understanding of the key ocean-atmospheric coupling dynamics.
• Experience with the analysis of large observational and model data set including ensemble models simulations.
• Knowledge of ocean mixed layer and/or atmospheric boundary layer parameterisations commonly used in climate models.
• Sophisticated programming skills to analyse large model and observational data sets.
• The ability to work effectively as part of a multi-disciplinary, regionally dispersed research team, plus the motivation and discipline to carry out autonomous research.
• A record of science innovation and creativity, plus the ability & willingness to incorporate novel ideas and approaches into scientific investigations.

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