Beschreibung

GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel is a foundation under public law jointly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany (90%) and the State of Schleswig-Holstein (10%). It is one of the internationally leading institutions in the field of marine research.

Through our research and our commitment to the transfer of knowledge and technology, we contribute significantly to the preservation of the function and protection of the ocean for future generations.

The Ocean Dynamics research unit at GEOMAR uses theory and numerical ocean models to advance our understanding of the physical processes of the ocean and climate system. Key areas of research include i) the global significance of oceanic eddies, turbulence, and upwelling; ii) the interplay of various physical processes and their role in ocean mixing; iii) scale interactions between ocean and atmosphere; and iv) the fundamental role of the oceans and their circulation in the climate system. These key areas are embedded in GEOMAR's Research Division 1 Ocean Circulation and Climate Dynamics which requires close collaboration with the measuring and climate modeling groups at GEOMAR, as well as further interdisciplinary collaborations.

The research unit Ocean Dynamics of the Research Division 1 Ocean Circulation and Climate Dynamics offers the following position starting as soon as possible, presumably on 01. January 2026.

The position offers the opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree as a member of the graduate school “Helmholtz School for Marine Data Science” (MarDATA). MarDATA is dedicated to training a new generation of “marine data scientists” by integrating expertise from computer science and mathematics into the field of ocean sciences. The school’s interdisciplinary focus spans supercomputing, modeling, (bio)informatics, robotics, statistics, and big data methodologies. Doctoral researchers benefit from a structured training program that promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration and provides in-depth scientific insight as well as a systematic approach to marine data science. For more information, visit: https://www.mardata.de/ . Job Description

The doctoral researcher will work in close collaboration between the Ocean Dynamics group (Prof. Stephan Juricke and Prof. Arne Biastoch) at GEOMAR and the Data Science group of Prof. Matthias Renz at the Faculty of Engineering at Kiel University. The goal is to contribute to a better understanding of oceanic processes on scales of a few kilometers using new computer science methods, particularly machine learning. This involves the analysis of very complex spatiotemporal phenomena, especially so-called submesoscale processes. These include eddies and fronts and play a crucial role in the mixing of water masses and their interaction with the atmosphere. The analysis will be based on data from high-resolution global ocean simulations with a particular focus on the Agulhas region off the southern tip of Africa. More specifically, the data used is from the NEMO ocean model and is generated in connection with the ERC project WHIRLS (https://www.whirls.eu). The doctoral researcher will work on new data mining methods to identify regions and processes of particular interest within these very large data sets. Furthermore, new deep learning algorithms (e.g., graph neural network (GNN) architectures) will be developed to explain the identified small-scale processes as accurately and efficiently as possible and to ultimately develop a surrogate model for simulations. This enables the representation of such processes even at significantly lower and less computationally time-intensive resolutions of the global ocean model. The doctoral researcher will thus not only be directly integrated into a larger, interdisciplinary, and team-oriented research unit at GEOMAR, but will also be co-supervised through the Institute of Computer Science at Kiel University. The doctoral researcher will also be closely integrated into the intern...