Research Scientist in Marine Cloud Brightening

University of Reading - Department of Meteorology

Location: Reading

Salary: £36,636 to £46,049 per annum

Hours: Full Time

Contract Type: Fixed-Term/Contract

Placed On: 10th September 2025

Closes: 3rd October 2025

Job Ref: SRF51738

Full Time, Fixed term (up to 3 years)

We are seeking a motivated research scientist to advance our understanding of regional climate responses to Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) and identify MCB deployment patterns that achieve global cooling whilst minimising detrimental regional impacts.

The post holder will be based in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. The Department of Meteorology is world-renowned for its pioneering research on weather, climate and earth observations with 100% of our research graded as world-leading or internationally excellent in REF2021. NCAS is a NERC research centre distributed across UK Universities. At Reading, it includes world-leading expertise on climate variability and change.

The main duties of the role are to:

• Assess the dynamical response to MCB deployments, and their impact on regional temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric circulation, including the regional monsoons
• Perform coupled-climate model simulations to develop optimal MCB deployment strategies that minimise residual climate impacts, and document strategies that should be avoided
• Assess the time of emergence of the MCB signal, and identify metrics can be used to robustly detect that MCB deployment is working as intended
• Explore the linearity and interaction of teleconnections from single and combined MCB regions in driving regional climate responses

Contact Name: Prof. Laura Wilcox

Contact Job Title: Professor of Aerosol-Climate Interactions

Contact Email address: l.j.wilcox@reading.ac.uk