Climate scientist

Pay in the destination countries

Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.

What does the day look like?

Your day is in a lab and a computing centre. You work in Python with xarray, dask and cartopy, plus R, Fortran, C++, CDO and NCO, open NetCDF and GRIB files, queue global models such as CESM, UKESM, EC-Earth, ICON and the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System on a Linux cluster with Slurm, track versions in Git. Tasks are developing and using mathematical and computer models for forecasting, interpreting data and maps with climate theory and physics, researching atmospheric processes, analysing climate data sets with geophysical fluid dynamics and data assimilation, running numerical simulations of climate conditions, estimating warming effects for specific regions, preparing scientific reports and articles.

Ice cores and balloon launches, the part people picture, take under 10% of time for most staff and 0% for pure modellers. The rest is code development and debugging, queuing and monitoring model runs, statistical evaluation against observations, writing papers and answering peer review, writing grant proposals, supervising doctoral students, presenting at conferences. O*NET reports 90% use email daily and 60% work a 40 hours week, indoors under controlled conditions. Research posts are daytime office hours with no rostered shifts. Deadline pressure near model intercomparison submissions and grant dates is regular. Operational forecasters at the same employers cover nights and weekends, research climate posts do not.

Where does this lead?