FYI

Open post-doc/ingeneer Research Scientist position

Spatial analyst on geospatial global remote sensing time series

1year position within the European Space Agency FIRE CCI projet

Context : FIRE CCI is the climate change initiative project from the European Space Agency launched in 2010. LSCE has been involved in the global Burned Area product task FIRE CCI since the early stage of Phase 1, and, as part of the climate assessment group, evaluated the benefits of new BA products in the DGVM ORCHIDEE and developped a new approach based on fire patch morphology dervied from the finest resolution of the product. Generating burnt patches from pixel level information requires the processing of time series of burn date maps developped by the consortium,  to aggregate pixel into patches and characterise the morphological of each fire patch (more than 8million Patches globally over the entire period). All these advances were published in Laurent et al. 2018 (Nature Scientific Data) for the global database and Laurent et al. 2019 (Biogeosciences) for a global assessment of fire spread processes.

Objectives of the Post doc :

FIRE CCI phase 3 is now launched for the period 2019-2021 with the goal of further assessment and use of Burned area products delivered in phase 2. The LSCE group is in charge of continuing the fire patch task initiated in Phase 2. Fire patch identification codes and patch morphology characterisation codes have been developped with R cran, respectively following a flood-fill algorithm (pixels aggregated according to neighboring burn dates) and landscape ecology tools for patch description. The increasing resolution of pixel resolution (from 500m for MCD64A1 MODIS data, to 250m FIRE_CCI51 and now 20m resolution for the FIRE_CCI small fire database in Africa from sentinel Sensor) now requires code optimisation and algorithm parallel programming for a more efficient processing time. The post doc will be in charge of adapting, improving and developping the previous codes (R cran and python for) in collaboration with P. Ciais (LSCE) and F. Mouillot (IRD Montpellier) to deliver new datasets based on FIRE CCI burnd area products, format final products with metadata information for data repository and data paper, and explore the benefits of fire shape information for global pyrogeography.

Required Skills :

The candidate will be fluent in writing and speaking english, with serious skills in big geospatial data processing, preferentially programming in R or other major languages, parallel programming and use of calculation clusters, and data quality checking. Geospatial analysis skills, image processing or landscape ecology knowledge are welcome for innovative approaches to develop in the project. Efficient writing skills in scientific papers is mandatory as author or contributor to common papers.

Candidate could be based in LSCE (gif/yvette, France) or CEFE Montpellier (with remote access to LSCE calculation facilities). Gross salary will be 2.600-2800€/month (before taxes).

Contact :   philippe.ciais@lsce.ipsl.fr and florent.mouillot@ird.fr