PhD Position – Monitoring and Predicting Droughts on National Scales

The PhD project is a part of the research project “Drought Resilience through satellite-integrated Early warning And Monitoring (DREAM)” funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF). The purpose of this project is to establish a satellite-integrated hydro-meteorological drought early warning and monitoring system for large-scale river basins. The project will explore both data-driven and model-based approaches for drought predictions, paving the way for a continental high-resolution drought prediction system.

The topic of this PhD position is the monitoring and prediction of droughts on national scale. The PhD student will develop a novel model-based drought index combination to reflect dryness of the atmosphere, hydrology and agriculture for Denmark. For this, the PhD candidate will work on novel approaches to identify droughts by introducing calibration and groundwater coupling to the VIC model. The candidate will develop novel strategies to simultaneously calibrate parameters and assimilate multiple satellite and in-situ observations of streamflow, soil moisture and groundwater into the model. Finally, the satellite-fed VIC model will be run for short-to-seasonal predictions of water dynamics for various dryness scenarios.