IPCC contributing author

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?

You work in a university or national laboratory. Your day is running and analysing global and regional climate models, processing observed temperature, precipitation, ocean and ice data, writing peer-reviewed papers, preparing grant proposals, supervising doctoral students, teaching atmospheric physics and statistics, presenting at conferences, and answering peer review. Your tools are Python, MATLAB, R, Fortran for legacy model code, Git, NetCDF and xarray for gridded data, ESRI ArcGIS, high-performance computing schedulers, and model frameworks from the Met Office, MPI-M, NCAR and IPSL.

IPCC work comes on top of that job during a cycle: you draft an assigned chapter section from the literature, merge co-author text, log replies to all reviewer comments across Draft 1 and Draft 2, with 2 formal review rounds, join author meetings, and work with Review Editors. Discovery is a small share of the time; reading, coding, debugging runs, documenting methods, revising calibrated uncertainty language and administration are the larger share. In O*NET 82% report 40 hours in a typical week. There is no routine night shift, but field campaigns, ship time, travel across time zones and pre-deadline drafting weeks run longer.

Where does this lead?