Consultant - Climate Modelling and Downscaling Expert

Salary: Level of pay band:
Band C/D

Duration: 100 working days within six months

Required: University degree preferably a Master’s or higher in meteorology, Climate Science, Atmospheric Science or a closely related discipline, with at least ten years of relevant professional experience in climate modelling.

Background: See our Career Portal for more details.

---

The purpose of this assignment is to strengthen the technical and institutional capacity of Meteo Rwanda to generate, evaluate, interpret and apply high-resolution climate projections for Rwanda. The consultant will develop and apply an appropriate climate-downscaling methodology, evaluate available climate-model products against observations, generate and validate high-resolution projections of key climate variables and extremes, and strengthen the capacity of Meteo Rwanda staff to independently undertake and sustain these processes.

The assignment will also support the development of climate information products that can be applied to early warning, climate-risk management, adaptation planning and climate-sensitive sectoral decision-making.

Under the overall supervision of WMO and in close technical coordination with Meteo Rwanda, the consultant will undertake the following tasks:

The consultant will review relevant national climate policies and strategies, previous climate studies, available observational datasets and existing climate projections to establish the technical and institutional requirements for generating nationally relevant high-resolution climate projections.

In consultation with Meteo Rwanda and relevant national stakeholders, the consultant will identify priority climate variables and indices, future time horizons, spatial and temporal scales, and climate-information requirements for national, sub-national and sectoral applications. The consultations will also identify priority uses of the climate projections, including their application to climate-risk management, adaptation planning and climate-sensitive sectoral decision-making.

Based on the review and consultations, the consultant will prepare an institutional engagement plan, methodological approach and training plan. The methodology will identify and justify the appropriate climate models, future climate scenarios, observational datasets, validation approaches, and statistical and/or dynamical downscaling techniques. The proposed methodology should take into account scientific robustness, computational requirements, data availability and Meteo Rwanda's capacity to replicate, update and sustain the approach beyond the consultancy.

Working closely with Meteo Rwanda meteorologists and climate scientists, the consultant will undertake quality control, processing and preparation of historical observational datasets, including rainfall and minimum and maximum temperature, required for climate-model evaluation, downscaling and validation.

The consultant will evaluate available historical climate-model products against ground observations to assess their ability to represent Rwanda's historical climatology and relevant climate extremes. Based on this assessment, the consultant will acquire, process and evaluate selected climate-model outputs and apply appropriate downscaling and bias-correction techniques.

The consultant will generate and validate high-resolution climate projections for key variables, including temperature and precipitation, and relevant indicators of climate extremes for agreed future time horizons. The consultant will provide a clear scientific justification for the selection of models, scenarios and downscaling methodologies and document the associated assumptions and limitations.

The analysis will assess projected climate trends, uncertainty and inter-model variability and identify robust climate-change signals related to temperature, rainfall variability and extreme events. Projected changes will be…