Job position requirements (skills/languages/required experience)
Skills: science background preferable; expertise and experience with implementing, maintaining, and managing gas analyzers for GHG such as picarros, licor, los gatos; knowledge in atmospheric chemistry; experience with atmospheric models prefeable.
Description
The postdoctoral fellow will be working alongside the URBAG research team (visit www.urbag.eu to learn more about our research and the team) and will be responsible for the GHG monitoring network that has recently been developed (visit https://urbag.eu/ghg/) and for developing a line of research that includes several of the following objectives, to be further defined by the candidate:
- Explore how various land uses of the urban region such as agriculture, parks, urban forest, and built areas affect the budget of CO2 in the city, while understanding the role of atmospheric processes in the transport and distribution of CO2.
- Develop services, tools, and datasets based on the needs of cities, for processing and analyzing the observation data to determine efficacy of GHG reduction strategies; raising awareness and engaging citizens.
- Collaborate with other SOMMA centers in the exploitation of this data, such as BSC, IS Global, CREAF and others with whom we have already established collaboration for the use of this data.
- Provide an exemplary urban GHG monitoring system in Europe and contribute to the European ambitious climate strategy to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement.
- Validate GHGs inventory accounts determined by the city administration as well as urban GHGs modeling efforts and to create repositories of atmospheric C distribution in cities.
- Intervene with schools in the city of Barcelona, so that climate culture forms part of the schools' curricula and transversal projects.
- supporting the core Maria de Maeztu challenges of ICTA (oceanic and land-use systems, cities, production and consumption patterns, and transformative policies) with pertinent data for their projects; i.e., modeling GHG changes due to "transformative policies", analyzing land-atmosphere CO2 exchange for urban land uses for "cities").
Furthermore, the candidate will be responsible for carrying out the tasks of the recently awarded EU project GASPOF " Pervasive gas sensing using optical fibers, as part of the communication network of the future", in which he/she will be dedicated to do the following tasks:
task 1) This task will focus on identifying and categorising stakeholder groups related to GASPOF developments and collecting their requirements. Focus will be placed on the GASPOF case studies’ application domains (pervasive greenhouse gases monitoring, indoor air quality monitoring, volcanic activity monitoring, pipelines monitoring).
task 2) Acquire an understanding of how the different system components will be tested and validated. This will require a definition of validation procedures which will include concentrations, frequency and method for sampling, golden standard techniques used for comparisons etc.
task 3) define the technical requirements/targets for the GASPOF system components. The technical specification requirements will cover: a) the spectroscopic setups and target performance indicators, b) the optical sources to use and target wavelengths for the sensing operations, c) the requirements for the operation of the telecommunications infrastructure in combination with the sensing elements, d) the integrated versions of the prototypes (including sub-modules such as the processing units).
Eligibility Criteria
PhD in environmental science, preferably atmospheric chemistry, physics, chemistry, modeling; Proficient in python, useful to have skills in fortran; Experience with atmospheric models is preferable, especially biosphere, chemical transport models and urban canopy models. Such as WRF, WRF-Chem, SUES, VPRM, Hysplit; English – C1; Experience: science background preferable; expertise and experience with implementing, maintaining, and managing gas analyzers for GHG such as picarros, licor, los gatos; knowledge in atmospheric chemistry; experience with atmospheric models preferable