THE POSITION

We are now opening a 3-year position for
PhD | Doctoral Candidate (W-0052 | all genders)
The successful candidate will be part of the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modeling (

ABOUT US

The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) is a multidisciplinary center for climate and Earth system research located in Hamburg, Germany. It is one of the premier climate science research institutes in the world. Located in the heart of one of Europe’s most livable and vibrant cities, it provides a highly international and interdisciplinary environment to conduct scientific research as well as access to state-of-the-art scientific facilities. You can also take a
virtual tour of our campus
.

Global climate is modulated by the zonal gradient of sea surface temperature (SST) across the equatorial Pacific ocean. Intuitive explanations of this zonal SST gradient typically invoke the direction of the easterly trade winds and the presence of continents. Such arguments imagine east-intensified ocean upwelling as the result of wind-driven surface currents moving away from South America and towards the Indonesian Archipelago. However, this reasoning falls apart under scrutiny: the region of maximum equatorial upwelling is thousands of kilometers away from the South American coast, and upwelling can persist at the western end of the basin.
Your task will be to use theory and a hierarchy of idealized simulations to explain why the equatorial Pacific cold tongue is on the eastern half of the basin. You will perform and analyze a series of numerical experiments designed to test whether the thermal structure of the equatorial Pacific is dictated by the spatial distribution of land mass, or of atmospheric forcing.