OverviewLynker is seeking a Support Scientist for Operational Wave and Storm Surge Modeling Development to accelerate and enhance operational marine modeling capabilities within the National Weather Service (NWS). With roughly 40% of the U.S. population residing in coastal communities and coastal flooding, storm surge, and rip currents remaining leading causes of weather-related hazards, this role advances foundational guidance for Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) to protect life and property. Working alongside a team, the specialist will support the development, testing, and implementation of physics-based, probabilistic, and machine learning surge/wave frameworks, integrate atmospheric forcing, and assist in transitioning cutting-edge capabilities into NWS operations. Additionally, the specialist will contribute to building and updating intuitive web interfaces to visualize pre-operational model output, ensuring rapid feedback and accessible data delivery for key stakeholders.
Responsibilities
The candidate will perform job duties in an independent, collaborative, and initiative-driven way, applying innovative methods across the primary work areas:
- Operational Modeling & System Integration: Work with the team to support the development, optimization, maintenance, and integration of wave and storm surge modeling capabilities within NWS operational architectures, ensuring strict alignment with operational standards.
- Coastal Processes & Hazard Prediction: Contribute to advancing numerical, statistical, and probabilistic formulations for key coastal phenomena, including total water level guidance based on storm surge and wave runup, rip current guidance, and real-time model merging/weighting.
- Atmospheric Forcing & Diagnostics: Work with meteorological input datasets (e.g., National Blend of Models -NBM) and derive key secondary diagnostics (e.g., generating synthetic pressure fields from wind fields using established formulations).
- Interagency & Sector Collaboration: Partner across multidisciplinary federal and private sectors (e.g., USGS, NOS, academic institutions, and private industry) to evaluate external models and accelerate the transition of research to operations .
- Model Experimentation & Validation: Assist in designing and executing numerical model experiments, applying advanced Python-based verification, performance metrics, and observational data-fusion techniques across regional and nearshore domains.
- System Support & Web Interfaces: Maintain, visualize, and disseminate marine modeling output by leveraging front-end web technologies to display pre-operational and operational model guidance for internal and public use.
Qualifications
The support scientist should have the following:
- An M.S. (or equivalent experience) in meteorology, physical oceanography, coastal engineering or a related field, with 7+ years in weather forecasting, physical oceanography, or coastal ocean science.
- Knowledge of spectral wave models (like WAVEWATCH III), in particular for real-time applications.
- Demonstrated experience with operational storm surge models (e.g., SLOSH, P-ETSS, P-Surge, SCHISM, and/or ADCIRC)
- Strong background in ensemble modeling, probabilistic output analysis, and real-time model merging and weighting techniques.
- Understanding of meteorological inputs and atmospheric forcing (e.g., NBM), with experience generating secondary fields (e.g., deriving synthetic pressure fields from wind fields using published formulations).
- Experience running numerical models on High Performing Computer (HPC) platforms using PBS and Slurm for job submittals, and MPI or OpenMP for multi-processing.
- Advanced skills and knowledge of modern programming languages and object-oriented languages, such as Fortran 90, C/C++ and Python.
- Experience working in a UNIX environment with advanced shell scripting languages and familiar with running complex jobs.
- Demonstrated proficiency using GitHub to manage software repositories, code versions, and projects.
- Ability to maintain, visualize, and disseminate marine modeling output and web-based products.
Preferred Qualifications & Skills:
- Demonstrated experience in real-time operational system integration, model blending, and software development within regional and nearshore domains.
- Direct experience operating within NOAA/NWS operational environments, specifically WCOSS and NCO standards (directory structures, production job controls, and script standards).
- Familiarity with applying artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques to enhance wave parameterizations, model efficiency, or forecast accuracy.
- Strong team-player mindset with a proven ability to collaborate across interagency and private sectors.
