Post Doctoral Research Associate

Description:

The Open University is recruiting for a UK Space Agency funded Post-doctoral Researcher position to perform atmospheric retrievals and global climate modelling using data from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission. This project is to perform retrievals from the NOMAD instrument data being returned from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission to Mars, as well as investigate the chemical processes regulating ozone in the atmosphere of Mars. This will be achieved through a comparison against simultaneous measurements of water by NOMAD, and the assimilation of these species into a Mars Global Climate Model. A key objective of this work is to attempt to understand why global climate models cannot correctly represent the abundance of ozone observed on Mars, through an analysis of the chemical relationships between ozone and water.

The postholder will join the vibrant Atmospheric Research and Surface Exploration group within the School of Physical Sciences, making use of the group’s high-performance computing facility based in the STEM Faculty.

Skills and experience

• You will hold a PhD in atmospheric physics, or a closely related field
• You will have experience in running planetary atmospheric climate models and ideally also in performing retrievals of gas species from atmospheric observations
• You will be able to evidence significant skills in Fortran and Python programming
• A strong record of research that is commensurate to the position.