Predicting Precipitation-Driven Disruptions to Critical Infrastructure

About the role

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA’s missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology.

Description

Extreme precipitation events are escalating hazards that contribute significantly to expensive disasters and impact critical infrastructure. Observations from NASA missions, including GRACE and GRACE-FO, confirm that the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall is increasing globally. This non-stationary hazard creates a critical prediction gap: the rarity of these events confounds traditional predictive attempts and limits the availability of training data for high-resolution atmospheric and hydrological models. This limitation is compounded by the fact that many atmospheric reanalysis products, often used as forcing data, systematically underestimate the intensity of true extreme precipitation maxima. This NPP fellowship seeks to overcome these fundamental limitations by employing advanced computational techniques grounded in physical laws. The research will accelerate the development of reliable predictive capabilities for high-impact, low-frequency rainfall extremes. The successful candidate will develop and implement large Earth foundation model pipelines. These pipelines will be utilized to generate synthetic datasets of precipitation events to predict infrastructure disruptions. Candidates must possess an exceptional background demonstrating expertise across atmospheric physics, computational modeling, and data science. Knowledge of atmospheric science or meteorology, and computer science is required.

Field of Science

Earth Science

Advisors

Christian Braneon
christian.v.braneon@nasa.gov
212-678-5561

Eligibility

- U.S. Citizens; - U.S. Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR); - Foreign Nationals eligible for an Exchange Visitor J-1 visa status; - Applicants for LPR, asylees, or refugees in the U.S. at the time of application with 1) a valid EAD card and 2) I-485 or I-589 forms in pending status

Contact

Questions about this opportunity? Please email npp@orau.org