IIASA ENERGY, CLIMATE, AND ENVIRONMENT (ECE) PROGRAM

The Sustainable Service Systems (S3) Research Group within the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) PROGRAM is recruiting multiple Research Scholars in Integrated Assessment Modeling.

ECE is one of the world’s leading global Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) teams, and seeks to deepen the understanding of rapid, just, and feasible systems transformations toward environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Interdisciplinary teams within ECE use these and complementary methods to study trade-offs and synergies between multiple policy priorities and objectives, typically across multiple sectors and scales (global, regional, national, and subnational). ECE’s scientific outputs inform international and national policy efforts related to climate change (e.g., implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement) and sustainable development (e.g., pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals).

The successful candidates will work with a team of international scientists to further develop the open-source WRF-TEB framework.

focal areas

Ongoing research in the S3 group spans a range of areas. In particular, candidates will be considered who can strongly contribute to one or more of the following areas:

1. Investigating the role and trade-offs of UHI mitigation and mitigating climate change by implementing optimized urban development including use of urban materials, vegetation, and integrated urban energy supply technologies at global, regional, and local scales.

2. Integrating urban and sub-urban aspects into the IAM framework to allow studying urban mitigation potentials, residual climate impacts on cities and urban adaptation options jointly.

3. Improving the representation of various energy supply technologies and vegetation in the WRF-TEB model.

• Perform in-depth research of recent urban datasets relevant for urban climate, microclimate and novel mitigation approaches. Define resilient urban climate classes and production of dataset suitable for modeling within the project based on research.
• Analyze, process, and utilize large-scale geospatial datasets for the target regions Vienna and Graz in Austria.
• Prepare urban parameters for present and future urban scenarios for all urban climate classes for the usage in WRF-TEB.
• Prepare meteorological and EO-datasets for validation of WRF-TEB.
• Improve the vegetation representation within the WRF-TEB model.
• Investigate, prepare, and analyze urban model scenario campaigns in conjunction with senior researchers and stakeholders of the project.
• Develop and document version-controlled collaborative modeling code that allows to re-process data and analyze datasets and model results.
• Maintain and disseminate relevant datasets according to FAIR data principles.
• Publish relevant results in peer-reviewed journals and actively engage in dissemination efforts such as scientific conferences and workshops, stakeholder, and policy events.
• Contribute to ongoing and future projects and related deliverables, reports, stakeholder communication and capacity building activities.
• In line with the team spirit that prevails at IIASA, the incumbent may occasionally work on other tasks assigned by their superiors, that might not be directly related to this appointment but where the post holder has relevant experience and skills, and/or a shortage of immediate personnel capabilities requires such.

Further Information