We are looking for a highly motivated PhD student within the Dynamical Meteorology and Climatology Unit of the Research Department at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI) in the context of the IcyAlert project (“Intelligent Climate Early Warning Alert for Arctic Ice-Free Summers”).
The IcyAlert project is funded by the Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation and spans from October 2025 to September 2031. The goal of IcyAlert is to improve predictions of Arctic ice-free summers and their climate impacts at multi-seasonal timescale using global climate models, causal methods and machine learning tools. The project is led by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), in collaboration with RMI and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
The PhD student will be based at RMI during 4 years and will be co-supervised by both Prof. François Massonnet (Université catholique de Louvain [UCLouvain], Belgium) and me, with multiple collaboration opportunities with colleagues in the two research institutes, as well as with collaborators in the two Danish IcyAlert partners (DMI and DTU) and RMI external partner institutes.
The job offer can be found at https://www.meteo.be/en/info/news-resume/offre-demploi-chercheur-projet-icyalert.
If you hold an MSc degree in a field related to the topic of this PhD and are interested in this position, please apply until Friday 3 April 2026.
Please contact me if you have any question about this job opportunity.
29/01/2026: Our peer-reviewed paper, led by Benjamin Richaud (UCLouvain), about the contribution of sea-ice mass balance terms in Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice lows has been published in The Cryosphere (HERE).
21/11/2025: I gave a seminar about the drivers of summer sea-ice extent based on information flow at the Laboratory of Climatology of the University of Liège (slides HERE).
21/10/2025: I co-organized the kick-off meeting of the IcyAlert project together with Tian Tian (DMI), Tommy S. Alstrøm (DTU) and Stéphane Vannitsem (RMI) at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) in Copenhagen (Denmark).
06/10/2025: Our peer-reviewed paper about the drivers of summer Antarctic sea-ice extent using information flow is now published in Climate Dynamics (HERE).
01/10/2025: I am starting to work on the IcyAlert project (Novo Nordisk Foundation funding) at RMI together with Stéphane Vannitsem (RMI), Tian Tian (DMI, lead) and Tommy S. Alstrøm (DTU). The goal is to improve multi-seasonal predictions of Arctic ice-free summers and its potential impacts using global climate models, causal analysis and machine learning.
11/09/2025: The RESIST project (François Massonnet and I), APECS Belgium (Marie Cavitte, Louise Delhaye and Coraline Leseurre) and IPF (Mieke Sterken) organized the BE-Polar Conference at Usquare.brussels. A related blog post by APECS Belgium can be found here and a few pictures of the event can be found here.
26/08/2025: Our peer-reviewed paper, led by Annelies Sticker (UCLouvain), about rapid Arctic sea-ice loss events has been published in The Cryosphere (HERE).
27/06/2025: Our project IcyAlert ("Intelligent Climate Early Warning Alert for Arctic Ice-Free Summers") has been accepted by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and will start on 1 October 2025 for a total duration of 6 years. The project will involve the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI, Tian Tian), RMI (Stéphane Vannitsem and I) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU, Tommy S. Alstrøm), and will aim at improving multi-seasonal forecasts of Arctic sea ice using global climate models, causal methods and machine learning. See press releases from RMI, DMI and DTU.