Weather and climate services critically depend on numerical models that compute the evolution of the atmosphere. The quality of the models has much increased over the past decades. It is the result of a steady accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological advances. Even though these advances did not receive the attention of major scientific breakthroughs, the impact of numerical weather prediction is amongst the greatest of any discipline in the physical sciences and represents a computational problem of a size comparable to the most challenging scientific problems.

The RMI has a team of about 15 scientists specialized in the development of atmospheric models. This model development takes place in international collaborations including leading weather centres. The RMI uses this model for its operational weather forecasts and for climate prediction. These models nowadays run at high resolutions of a few kilometers. Over the past two decades, the RMI has made numerous scientific contributions to all aspects of the model development.

The UGent has organized, in close collaboration with the RMI, a postgraduate study program on weather and climate modeling to prepare masters in science for this type of research. The RMI NWP team was trained in this program. This program formed the basis for strong UGent-RMI collaboration that has led to numerous scientific outputs (PhDs, publications) and it created many synergies and opportunities for new activities (climate modeling and urban meteorology). Based on this RMI-UGent link a new unit, called Atmospheric Physics, was created in 2017 as part of the department Physics and Astronomy.

The FED-tWIN researcher will perform research in the domain of atmospheric modeling to contribute to this program and will be expected, after his/her tenure track, to take scientific leadership in the Atmospheric Physics unit.