APS Level 6 – Executive Level 1 (BB3 Research Scientist), Ongoing $94,563 - $125,832 per annum + 15.4% super Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney
The Bureau's Research Program sits within the Science and Innovation Group and is the main driver of science-based innovation in the Bureau of Meteorology. In supporting the Bureau to deliver impactful weather, climate, ocean and water information services, the research contributes to advancing meteorological and earth system sciences in Australia and globally. Research activities cover the broad fields of weather, climate, oceanography, earth systems modelling, data set development, process studies, and application development.
The Hydrological Modelling team of the Bureau’s Research Program is seeking a talented and highly-motivated hydrological scientist with land surface modelling experience. The successful candidate will undertake novel research into hydrological and land surface dynamics modelling for Australian conditions in an Earth System Modelling framework within the Hydrological Modelling team. In addition, this role will contribute to the expansion of Earth Observation data in use for the validation/verification of and data assimilation into the land surface scheme. The Hydrologist is also expected to contribute to discussions on the definition and progression of the research program’s main aims and will need to have:
• A very good understanding of land surface modelling and remote sensing across different landscape types with a particular focus on soil hydrology, surface routing, and vegetation dynamics.
• Experience in the evaluation of spatio-temporal data sets originating from models and observations.
• A good knowledge of land-atmosphere exchange processes and experience in running land-atmosphere coupled models.
• Flexibility to work effectively and productively as a member of a team under the direction of more senior scientists, and an ability to plan and undertake research and to publish research results.
• Outstanding communication skills, including the ability to write science papers, work plans, present work orally, and translate science outcomes in ways which can be understood by non-expert audiences.
• Excellent analytical and scientific programming skills, including extensive experience with LINUX (preferably in a high-performance computing setting), and with scientific and visualisation.
The role involves close collaboration with scientific and technical staff across the Research Program, and with other Bureau employees and international stakeholders, requiring experience in liaising effectively with external stakeholders.
The Hydrologist role in research is to support and lead research in select projects, and to interact with scientists and external research projects, working collaboratively with Bureau internal staff to deliver research to operations, and working with customers where required.
Tasks include setting up, parameterising, and evaluating continental-scale hydrological/land surface models, trialling assimilation of various remotely sensed datasets to improve performance of hydrological/land surface models, using scripting and coding languages (e.g. Python) on Bureau Linux systems and understanding customer needs and input into external projects when required.
Openness to collaborate across the Hydrology Sciences section and other teams within Research as well as Research to Operations teams is expected to increase the success of the project deliveries and operationalisation.
📌 Hydrologist
🏢 Bureau Of Meteorology
📍 Sydney