Postdoctoral Appointee - Coastal-urban Flooding

Argonne National Laboratory seeks a postdoctoral researcher to help build a high-resolution coastal-urban flooding modeling capability within the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). This position focuses on:

• The investigation of coupled land-river-ocean processes in coastal flooding applications by developing a coupled E3SM configuration that incorporates a subgrid-scale version of the MPAS-Ocean model coupled with E3SM’s land and river components.
• Including wave setup processes into E3SM by coupling the E3SM wave and ocean components.
• Application of this coupled model to better understand extreme regional compound flooding within a global Earth system model. The aim is to enable realistic coastal flooding simulations within seasonal-to-decadal simulations and to advance DOE’s capability to assess evolving risks in coastal-urban regions.

Other key responsibilities include:

• Mesh design and high-resolution data utilization.
  • Develop and refine high-resolution barotropic ocean meshes along U.S. coastlines, including incorporation of levees, jetties, and wetlands.
  • Ingest and process coastal datasets (bathymetry, topography, land use/cover) to support accurate wetting and drying and bottom friction/vegetation drag parameterizations.
• E3SM integration and coupling.
  • Integrate two-way land–river–ocean couplings with a subgrid scale ocean model to support upstream river boundary conditions and coastal inundation processes.
  • Incorporate wave setup effects by coupling WAVEWATCH III radiation stresses to E3SM configurations for coastal extreme water levels.
• Validation and application.
  • Design and run event-scale and historical simulations to validate coastal water levels, tides, and storm surge against observations for representative extreme and sequential events.
  • Analyze model performance and sensitivity (e.g., drag schemes, mesh resolution, feature representation); document improvements and limitations. Collaboration, mentoring, and dissemination.
• Collaborate with DOE E3SM, ICoM, and InteRFACE, projects as well as university partners on coastal methods and validation strategies.
• Mentor summer students on data analysis and visualization workflows.
• Publish in peer-reviewed journals, present at scientific conferences, and contribute to open-source code repositories and documentation.