When and what:

Scholarship for a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Politecnico di Torino in the Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering for 3 years, starting on March 1st, 2024 (39th cycle), under the supervision of

  • Prof. Jost von Hardenberg (DIATI, Politecnico di Torino) and of
  • Dr. Paolo Davini (Inst. of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy).

General description:

The goal of the research is the tuning and validation of a new very low resolution and computationally efficient version of the state-of-the-art EC- Earth global climate model, applying it to the study of tipping point transitions in the climate system with a special focus on earth’s past warm paleoclimate states.

The current generation of state-of-the-art (e.g. CMIP6) global numerical climate models (GCM) has seen a tremendous investment in terms of development in recent years. Such models are characterised by increasing spatial resolution (which currently lies between 25 and 100km) and by the capability to represent a large number of processes and components of the climate system, leading to the current definition of comprehensive “Earth- system models”. These models typically require huge computing resources (typically thousands of core-hours per model year), allowing running them only at high-performance computing (HPC) centers, using hundreds of computing cores. This limits their use at an academic level but also limits the length of model integrations and/or the size of the ensembles, making it almost impossible to use these models for long-term analysis of the climate, as for example for paleoclimatic studies. To this end a low-resolution version of the state-of-the-art global Earth-system model EC-Earth is being developed by ISAC-CNR and Politecnico, capable of competing with so-called models of intermediate complexity in terms of reduced computational needs but at the same time characterised by advanced, state-of -the-art representation of model components and an in-depth representation of physics.

EC-Earth is a model which participated in the CMIP5 and CMIP6 model comparison projects and its latest next-generation version (EC-Earth4) is currently under development by a large European consortium in which Politecnico di Torino is participating. ISAC-CNR and Politecnico are currently developing a configuration with a low resolution both in the atmosphere (between 200 and 600km – to be defined) and in the ocean (about 2°), allowing it to run at a limited cost (typically between 16 and 48 cores and less than 100 core-hours per model year) on computers easily available at University/department level. Part of this project will involve validating the model for the present-day climate by comparing with observations/reanalyses datasets to verify the representation of a realistic mean climate and of significant climate processes and performing sensitivity experiments to tune the model.

This model will then be applied, with a scientific collaboration with two currently funded PRIN projects (EPOCHAL and CRAWL) coordinated respectively by ISAC-CNR and Politecnico di Torino, to the study of tipping-point transitions in the Earth’s climate, with a particular focus of past warm periods, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and associated hypertermals (sudden extreme global warming events linked with massive carbon release episodes). Numerical experiments are planned to investigate the role of orbital forcing, dynamic vegetation and of the land-sea mask distribution to determine climate sensitivity. This is a problem which is also extremely relevant to understand current future projections and to test the behaviour of current climate models out of their ‘comfort zone’, with different mean climate conditions.

This project will be performed in the framework of the HPC-TRES (“High Performance Computing Training and Research for Earth Sciences”) Joint Research Unit, dedicated to advancing capacity building and advanced formation in the fields of Earth-System modelling and of numerical methods in an HPC setting and it is in particular being co-funded by HPC-TRES (through OGS - Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale), by the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-ISAC) and by DIATI - Politecnico di Torino. The research will be performed in close collaboration and with co-tutoring by CNR-ISAC (Torino unit) and will expose the candidate also to the wider HPC- TRES community (with participation in the annual HPC-TRES workshop) and to the pan-european EC-Earth development community.

Where to apply and additional information:

· More information on the PhD program at Politecnico di Torino and how to apply in the call for applications

· Specific information on available scholarships in “Civil and environmental engineering”

· Further detailed information on this position, under the title “OGS/CNR/DIATI - Development of a low-resolution version of the EC-Earth global climate”

· The position will be open in the “third call” and applications will be received from 2/11/2023 to 20/11/2023 (at 12 PM – CET time) using the Apply@polito platform.

· Please contact Jost von Hardenberg (jost.hardenberg@polito.it) and Paolo Davini (p.davini@isac.cnr.it) for more information or to announce your intention to apply.