Physical geography modeler of hazardous processes for crisis response – UNV jobs in the USA

• Location: USA
• Vacancy No: N/A 
• Salary: N/A
• Organization: UNV 
• Gender: Both
• Deadline: 2024-04-03
  

Details
Mission and objectives

UNDP has a long-standing partnership with Small Island Developing States?(SIDS), with an estimated annual value of US$300m, supporting SIDS to advance national development priorities and respond to diverse challenges and opportunities.?UNDP’s?upgraded SIDS offer responds to their most pressing needs as well as greatest opportunities for accelerating sustainable development. Building on multipliers that promise to accelerate progress across the SDGs, and building on?UNDP’s?comparative advantage and specific expertise, UNDP is expanding its support in: Climate Action, developing Blue Economies and promoting Digital Transformation.

Context
Reacting to various crises, risks and hazards assumes a sound situational awareness of social aspects (people, infrastructure, goods) as well as natural aspects (floods, earthquakes, landslides, etc.) on the ground. While data related to social factors and aspects is in general available, data and knowledge related to natural processes inducing risks is much more scarce and poorly documented. Latest development in remote sensing have made it possible to monitor hazardous events close to real time and mitigate their adverse effects. This approach however can not be used to predict the events in advance. An alternative solution is to use environmental (physical, empirical, semi-empirical) models to predict the hazardous events before they happen. This solution provides a sound advantage for the crisis teams on the ground for operational and management purposes. The assignment aims to build an updated picture of latest state of the art spatio temporal models that could be deployed for the purpose modeling these types of events in advance and close to real time to gain leverage for the crises teams.

Task type
Research

Task description
The goal of this assignment is to curate, investigate and research several environmental processes inducing risks to human population and society and identify spatio temporal models that have the potential to be deployed as geospatial services to power data driven decision making for crisis teams on the ground. The output will be a report describing and detailing modeling approaches and tools for major hazards like: droughts, river and coastal floods, heat waves, landslides, flash floods in the range of 3-4 A4 pages per hazard. Additionally, hands on modeling work will be conducted on a selected hazard like landslides or flash floods using identified tools and software libraries. The goal here is to deploy the model as a docker image suitable to be deployed in cloud computing solutions.

Requirements
Required experience
Sound knowledge pertinent to the fields of physical geography, geomorphology, hydrology, geology. Basic knowledge of environmental modeling through software boxes like GRASS GIS and/or QGIS. Basic knowledge of Geographic Information Science.
Hands on experience (including field work) with studying gephysical processes.

Languages
English, Level: Working knowledge, Required

Other information
Inclusivity statement
United Nations Volunteers is an equal opportunity programme that welcomes applications from qualified professionals. We are committed to achieving diversity in terms of gender, care protected characteristics. As part of their adherence to the values of UNV, all UN Volunteers commit themselves to combat any form of discrimination, and to promoting respect for human rights and individual dignity, without distinction of a person’s race, sex, gender identity, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, age, language, social origin or other status.

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