CRSA – Postdoc in Enhanced water balance modeling scheme over Morocco

Located at the heart of the future Green City of Benguerir, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P), a higher education institution with international standards, is established to contribute to the development of Morocco and the African continent. Its vision is honed around research and innovation at the service of education and development. This unique nascent university, with its state-of-the-art campus and infrastructure, has woven a sound academic and research network, and its recruitment process is seeking high-quality academics and professionals in order to boost its quality-oriented research environment in the metropolitan area of Marrakech.

About CRSA

CRSA is a transversal structure across several UM6P Programs. Research within the center is organized around several major areas that aim to ensure the challenging Food and Water security goal in Africa, with a special focus on developing methods/tools that use multi-source remotely sensed data. The research aims to improve our understanding of the integrated functioning of continental surfaces and their interaction with climate and humans, with emphasis on sustainable management of natural resources (soil, land, water, agriculture) in the context of Climate Change. One of the center’s goals is to provide a set of services and operational products to users (local, national, and international) that aid in the decision support of water and food systems.

Job Description

For sustainable management of water resources, it is crucial to be able to accurately quantify the evolution of surface and groundwater storage. For a long time, the main tools for providing such information for planning purposes have been hydrological models. They come in various configurations, from simple, conceptual lumped models to more complex, distributed ones. Their low input data requirements and flexible application make them widely used by water managers. While very attractive, these models can be pretty challenging when attempting to compute the water budget over broader regions, mainly in ungauged catchments. Being developed for specific contexts, the structure of these models, depending on the dominant regime and its dynamics, put more focus on a specific water balance component than others. This can make the structure inadequate to be directly transferred to other regions with different physiographic contexts and hydroclimatic regimes. The most recent advances in large-scale gridded hydrometeorological data with relatively high spatio-temporal resolution offer an unprecedented opportunity to address some of these issues, particularly with the extensive emergence of data-driven modeling approaches.

In this perspective, we are looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to join our Center for Remote Sensing Applications team. The successful candidate will work on implementing a hybrid modeling scheme driven by remote sensing data to enhance the estimation of some of the significant water balance components. The candidate is expected to seek an optimal integration between the physical representations of the various processes and the computing power of the AI algorithms.

Key duties

• Develop a robust framework to simulate streamflow decomposed into fast-flow and baseflow at multiple Moroccan watersheds. The candidate would have to test various fast-flow and, more importantly, baseflow simulation methods and outline their adequacy depending on physiography and climate conditions.
• Implement an enhanced snow balance modeling scheme employing multisource remote sensing data. The candidate will consider and investigate the existing tools and then suggest an enhanced prediction scheme of the snow dynamics (snow accumulation and snowmelt) over the Atlas Mountain range.
• Make use of the developed modeling scheme to outline the drainage area’s contribution to the storage changes of surface and underground reservoirs.
• Better identify the contribution of rainfall and snowmelt.
• Design and conduct fieldwork for in-situ measurements and samplings.
• Closely work with researchers and students involved in spatial hydrology.
• Publish scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and deliver presentations and progress reports.
• Contribute to the supervision of Masters and Ph.D. students.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Spatial Hydrology, Environmental sciences, Earth sciences, or related fields
• Strong background in hydrology and remote sensing techniques.
• Proficiency in computer programming tools such as Matlab and/or Python.
• Knowledge of statistics and mathematical modeling.
• Experience in large spatial data processing, analysis, and interpretation.
• Experience in running and evaluating environmental models.
• Good publication record.
• Good speaking and writing communication skills.
• Ability to collaborate with other team members and UM6P departments.