Colin Zarzycki

The Department of Earth and Mineral Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University is seeking a postdoctoral scholar to contribute to the DOE-funded HyperFORMANCE project. The position is based in a multi-institutional research effort focused on developing global AI/ML Earth system emulators and regional downscaling methods for generating physically credible extreme weather scenarios. Working under the supervision of Prof. Colin Zarzycki, the postdoc will help evaluate how global AI/ML emulators reproduce extreme weather features and where physics-based models remain essential. The project combines AI/ML methods, physics-based simulations, existing model archives, and certified emulation to build libraries of decision-relevant extreme events for downstream risk assessment. The scholar will develop and apply machine learning clustering techniques to distill large event libraries into representative scenario sets and event archetypes. They will also generate large ensembles of spatially coherent and temporally compounded hazard scenarios at testbed-relevant scales, supporting applications in water and energy system risk analysis. Research activities include applying global weather and climate emulators, performing process-oriented diagnostics on extreme precipitation and major storm systems, comparing emulator outputs against physics-based benchmarks and observations, and using regional downscaling tools to create km-scale meteorological fields. The role also involves collaboration with hydrologic, energy, and urban impacts teams, plus participation in workshops, coordination meetings, conference presentations, and peer-reviewed publications.