Vegetation fire danger monitoring post-doctoral fellowship at CNRM F/M
Toulouse, 31057
CDD
01/03/2026- 31/10/2027
3470.33€- 4252.98€
Description
As a public weather and climate expert, Météo-France is at your side to contribute to your day-to-day safety and help you make the best decisions in a changing climate. Faced with dangerous weather episodes that are even more intense and more frequent as a result of climate change, our missions in the service of your safety are crucial. We mobilize our expertise and our scientific and technological excellence to help you anticipate and adapt to challenging weather and climate phenomena.
Find us online: https://meteofrance.com/carte-didentite-de-meteo-france
Joining Météo France means joining a multi-site organization, located in France, overseas, etc. Météo-France is organized into central and inter-regional divisions. Below is a presentation of the department you could join :
GreenEO is a Horizon Europe project which uses satellite data, environmental modelling and digital tools to promote sustainable land use across Europe. In the face of mounting environmental challenges such as urban expansion, pollution, biodiversity loss and climate-related risks, GreenEO aims to provide policymakers, land managers and communities with actionable information. The project supports the goals of the European Green Deal, particularly with regard to clean air, biodiversity protection, and sustainable land management. GreenEO's primary objective is to provide enhanced satellite-based environmental data to promote sustainable nature conservation practices in four competing land use sectors: cities, agricultural areas, semi-natural and natural forests, and ecosystems. By combining new Earth Observation (EO) products, digital infrastructures, and modelling capabilities with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, inverse modelling techniques, and atmospheric and land surface models, GreenEO will provide new environmental information and stakeholder engagement practices. These will support the implementation of specific endpoints under the Zero Pollution and Biodiversity aspects of the European Green Deal.
Missions
The research work carried out by the VEGEO (Vegetation, Water and Geophysics) team focuses on four complementary areas: (1) Modelling and remote sensing observation of vegetation fire risk and monitoring of fire emissions, (2) Data assimilation to better represent the soil-plant system in the hydrological cycle and the impact of climate change, (3) Improvement and enhancement of land surface observation, (4) Improvement and enhancement of atmospheric aerosol observation.
CNRM develops the ISBA land surface model within SURFEX, an operational modelling platform that can simulate terrestrial water and carbon fluxes. It can be coupled with a variety of atmospheric and hydrological models and incorporates a global land data assimilation system (LDAS-Monde), which uses an Extended Kalman filter to assimilate satellite data and analyse soil moisture and vegetation biomass at spatial resolutions ranging from 1 to 25 km. First, the postdoctoral fellow will implement LDAS over Europe using atmospheric forcing from the ARPEGE numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. Relevant land surface predictors of live fuel moisture content (LFMC) will then be used to train a neural network capable of simulating LFMC across Europe. This product will then be validated using in situ LFMC observations and verified using existing LFMC gridded datasets. The results will be published in open literature.
Profile
The candidates should have knowledge of at least one of these topics: deep learning, data assimilation, land surface modelling, remote sensing. They should be familiar with programming data analysis in Python, and with the Linux environment.
Further information :
Duration of the contract : 18 months
Deadline application : 30/09/2025
Teleworking friendly : Up to 2 days a week
Required level of education/ Diploma : PhD
Required level of experience : Beginner or Advanced
Required level in french : Not required
Email contacts for any further information : jean-christophe.calvet@meteo.fr
Why join us ?
Embark on a stimulating adventure in the service of all, alongside men and women committed to the daily challenges posed to our society by the weather and climate. And enjoy the following benefits: flexible working hours, RTT, telecommuting, administrative restaurant or luncheon voucher, 75% contribution to public transport, contribution to health insurance, sports and cultural associations depending on the site (climbing, gym, pottery, theater, etc.).
Other benefits await you, come and discover them !