The Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University is seeking applicants for a 3-year NSF-funded assistantship, beginning on August 15, 2012, focusing on "quantification and visualization of uncertainty in numerical weather model ensembles". Ensembles are commonly used to define areas of uncertainty within an atmospheric simulation, and as such are critical in research associated with downscaling of climate data for regional assessment, including sensitivity analysis of parameter schemes and input data and process-oriented diagnostics of atmospheric variables. The position will work closely with Dr. Jamie Dyer and Dr. Andrew Mercer in the Department of Geosciences and Dr. Song Zhang in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering to formulate numerical weather prediction ensembles, and will assist in the uncertainty quantification tasks of the project. Tasks will be completed on the state-of-the-art supercomputing systems available at the High Performance Computing Collaboratory at Mississippi State University.

Applicants should have a Master of Science (or equivalent) university degree in meteorology, geophysics, physics or mathematics. Experience in numerical weather prediction, particularly with the Weather and Research Forecasting Model, data assimilation, and uncertainty statistics is highly desirable. In addition, programming experience in Fortran90, C and/or the R Statistical Software and familiarity with a cluster supercomputing environment is highly desirable.

Interested candidates should send a complete application package (CV; cover letter describing background, training and research interests; certificates; contact information of two references) as a single PDF to Andrew Mercer (aem35@msstate.edu) and Jamie Dyer (jd381@msstate.edu) by February 1, 2012. The position will be funded as a research assistantship for 3 years with a possibility for 2 more years of departmental funding as needed.