Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is filling the position of
Science Officer
IPCC Technical Support Unit (IPCC WGI)
Located at the University of Paris-Saclay (Saint-Aubin, France)
The Working Group I (WGI) Technical Support Unit (TSU) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is recruiting a Science Officer for the WGI contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6): the assessment of the physical science basis of climate change.
The Science Officer will be part of the TSU Science Team, advising on the assessment and consistent treatment of climate science topics within the report and in relation to the wider AR6 assessment. Your primary area of responsiblity is the development of long-term curation of open source software for figures and data used within the WGI AR6.
The TSU works at the unique interface of the IPCC between science and policy in the provision of the climate information that is relevant for policy needs and decision making. The TSU as a whole provides scientific, technical, operational and communications support for the activities and products of WGI. We are a dynamic team working tightly together on the development and preparation of all aspects of the WGI assessment. Join a team that spans different areas of expertise in global and regional climate modeling, climate processes (including oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, and land-surface processes) visual design and communication, policy development and international project management.
The AR6 WGI assessment is placing significant emphasis on the treatment of digital information such as data and software, including the innovative development of an online interactive Atlas platform to navigate assessed digital information. WGI has an opportunity to make significant progress within the AR6 in terms of data handling and accessibility of code for producing figures and tables for transparency and traceability and to ensure the accessibility of assessed model and observational data. This is important to build public trust in the assessment process as whole, as well as supporting the work of the broader research community.
The successful candidate will work closely with the AR6 authors, working with chapter teams, the TSU and WGI Bureau to establish best practices for the development of common software for the figures produced by chapters. The work will build on other existing activities such as the Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool), a community effort involving both users and developers that encourages open exchange of diagnostic source code for model evaluation and provides end-to-end provenance tracking to ensure reproducibility of figures. Assessed data provenance, accessibility and curation will build on activities such as the Earth System Grid Federation and the IPCC Data Distribution Centre for sourcing data products and analysis scripts used in the assessment and to provide long-term discoverable archival solutions.
We are looking for someone who is enthusiastic in promoting the value of data and its accessibility and usability by different user communities around the world and in fostering open source community practices, data literacy and computational skills for data management and analysis for climate science information.
Requirements
- PhD or other qualification in climate or related science or digital humanities;
- Proficiency in open source and and proprietary coding environments (e.g. Python, R, Matlab, shell scripting etc) and data development, access and curation;
- Knowledge of more than one coding environment would be an advantage;
- Experience in open source community development, code and data versioning (e.g. github, bitbucket, etc) and the development of best practices;
- Experience with processing, analysis, visualisation and interpretation of global or regional climate datasets;
- Experience with web-based applications and tools;
- Familiarity with data and software citation;
Attributes
- Self-starter, a motivated collaborative thinker that seeks and creates opportunities;
- High mobility and motivation to work in an international team with a common long-term goal;
- Ability to plan, organize and execute multi-task problems to meet deadlines;
- A strong team player who is willing to step up to support others as needed and is looking forward to inspiring interactions with the international climate science community;
- Capacity to respect time constraints and stress-resistance;
- Proficiency in written and spoken English; working knowledge of French would be an asset;
- Previous experience of the IPCC or other international activities would be an asset.
Application
The position is for three years, with the possibility of extension through the completion of the project to 2022.
We are seeking availability to start as soon as possible after the deadline for applications. We hope the new Science Officer will join the TSU and WGI AR6 authors in Vancouver, Canada for the Second Lead Author Meeting on 7-11 January 2019.
Contact Anna Pirani (anna.pirani@universite-paris-saclay.fr ), Head of TSU, for any enquiries.
Please apply by sending a letter of motivation, curriculum vitae and contact details for two referees to Elisabeth Lonnoy (elisabeth.lonnoy@universite-paris-saclay.fr ), Project Assistant, WGI TSU. The deadline for applications is 15 December 2018.