Scientific researcher modeling Earth system feedbacks

The chair for Physical Geography and Land Use Systems (Prof. Julia Pongratz) at LMU’s Department of Geography investigates the interactions between natural ecosystems, land use and climate change. Our group develops and applies the latest generation of land and Earth system models and integrates them with observations. Key research questions are the fate of natural ecosystems under the pressures of land use and climate change, Earth system feedbacks via energy, water and biogeochemical cycles, and assessing the role that the terrestrial vegetation can play for greenhouse gas emissions reduction and CO2 removals in support of the Paris Agreement. The team is strongly involved in large international collaborations such as the Global Carbon Project, CMIP and IPCC.

Your tasks and responsibilities:

The scientific researcher will be part of the Horizon Europe project “RESCUE” [1], which comprises a large model intercomparison project to quantify the Earth system response to pathways achieving climate neutrality by Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) deployment. A special focus lies on Earth system feedbacks and aspects of reversibility and environmental risks under scenarios of temperature overshoot. In RESCUE, the scientific researcher at LMU will

• contribute to the design of CDR scenarios as a collaboration of Earth system and socioeconomic modelers,
• set up, run and analyze model simulations of the ICON/MPI Earth System Model,
• further develop methods of “detection and attribution” in order to improve recommendations on the setup of observational systems for early detection of CDR signals and side-effects,
• take a leading role in the development of scientific publications.