Snow, satellite data assimilation, and the impact on the atmosphere

KU Leuven is looking for an enthusiastic PhD student or postdoctoral researcher with interest or experience (respectively) in (i) snow modeling or snow remote sensing, (ii) data assimilation or machine learning, and (iii) land-atmosphere interactions. You will be part of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Division Soil and Water Management, Research Group “Land Surface Remote Sensing, Modeling and Data Assimilation” (RSDA) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), and collaborate with the Hydro-Climate Extremes Lab (H-CEL) Research Group within the Department of Environment at Ghent University (UGent).

The candidate will be jointly supervised by prof. dr. ir. Gabriëlle De Lannoy and dr. ir. Hans Lievens. Therefore, the PhD student will obtain a joint degree at KU Leuven – UGent. The postdoc is expected to work in a broad international context, and collaborate with PhD and MSc students.
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Project

Remote sensing of snow water equivalent (SWE) has been notoriously difficult. Even though some estimates can be obtained from passive and active microwave sensors, the snow-radiation interactions are not yet fully understood and therefore limit the snow retrieval quality. In the proposed research, we will learn the microwave interactions with snow via machine learning and perform a direct assimilation of active and passive microwave signals into a land surface model. This is expected to improve both the snow depth and SWE estimates over mountain regions. Next, these improved snow estimates will be used to initialize weather forecasts with a coupled land-atmosphere model. More specifically, the land surface data assimilation will be performed with Noah-MP within NASA’s LIS and the coupled land-atmosphere simulations will be done with NU-WRF. 

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For PhD students:

Offer

• EITHER: fully funded PhD scholarship for 4 years; support and training through the Arenberg Doctoral School (https://set.kuleuven.be/phd); students graduated with an MSc degree in the summer 2025 are encouraged to apply 
• OR: postdoc position for 2 years, with a possibility for 1 year extension 
• The start date can be negotiated, but is ideally in the fall of 2025. 
• Competitive salary, support in career development 
• Multi-disciplinary and international professional environment 
• Leuven is a charming historical university town, located in the heart of Western Europe 

Interested?

For more information please contact Prof. dr. ir. Gabrielle De Lannoy, tel.: +32 16 37 67 13, mail: Gabrielle[dot]delannoy[at]kuleuven[dot]be.

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