Staff Careers

The Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) seeks a Research Associate III in Hydrology to support applied hydrologic modeling and water resources research within the CZHydro Lab. The position will directly contribute to activities supporting the Alabama Office of the State Climatologist, with emphasis on streamflow analysis, land surface modeling, drought monitoring, and regional surface water budget assessments.

The successful candidate will work on process-based hydrologic and land surface modeling frameworks to improve understanding and prediction of water availability across Alabama and the broader southeastern United States. This position requires strong foundational hydrology knowledge and hands-on experience with modeling and geospatial data analysis.

Duties / Responsibilities:

• Support implementation and evaluation of process-based hydrologic and land surface models (LSMs) for regional applications.
• Assist with streamflow simulation, watershed-scale water balance analysis, and surface water budget assessments.
• Contribute to model parameterization, calibration, and validation using in situ observations (e.g., USGS streamflow gauges, soil moisture networks) and gridded datasets.
• Process and analyze meteorological forcing data and remotely sensed observations relevant to hydrologic applications.
• Assist in the development of reproducible workflows for model execution, post-processing, and visualization.
• Support drought and flood assessment activities relevant to the Alabama Office of the State Climatologist.
• Contribute to technical documentation, reporting, and peer-reviewed publications.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams and external stakeholders as needed.

• Bachelor’s degree (BS) in Hydrology, Civil or Environmental Engineering, Earth System Science, Atmospheric Science, or a closely related field.
• 2 to 2.5 years of verifiable, full-time work experience.
• Strong foundational knowledge of hydrologic processes, including runoff generation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, soil moisture dynamics, and watershed hydrology.
• Experience with scientific programming (e.g., Python, MATLAB, R, or similar).
• Familiarity with handling geospatial and gridded datasets (e.g., NetCDF, GeoTIFF).
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a research environment.

• Master’s degree (MS) in Hydrology, Civil or Environmental Engineering, Earth System Science, or related field is preferred.
• Experience with process-based hydrologic or land surface models (e.g., VIC, LIS, Noah-MP, or comparable frameworks) is desired.
• Experience with streamflow model calibration and evaluation metrics (e.g., NSE, bias, RMSE) is desired.
• Familiarity with meteorological forcing datasets (e.g., NLDAS, reanalysis products, gridded precipitation) is desired.
• Experience working in Linux/HPC environments is desired.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills are desired.

$52,216 - $55,407