Earth, Atmosphere & Environment Sciences
Title : | MApping Terrestrial wateR resources from spAce (MATRA) |
Area of research : | Earth, Atmosphere & Environment Sciences |
Principal Investigator : | Dr. Bramha Dutt Vishwakarma, Indian Institute Of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka |
Timeline Start Year : | 2022 |
Timeline End Year : | 2024 |
Contact info : | bramha@iisc.ac.in |
Equipments : | Desktop |
Details
Executive Summary : | In the last few decades, climate change and human intervention has led to increase in strength and frequency of extreme water availability. Therefore, mapping changes in water availability and understanding its drivers are essential for ensuring socio-economic security of any country. However, obtaining accurate water volume timeseries and separating impact of climate change from human intervention and natural variability has been challenging. With advances in satellite remote sensing and satellite Geodesy, we can now attempt to solve these issues. In this project, I will combine satellite gravimetry data (GRACE) with a novel altimetry data (SWOT) and several hydrometeorological variables to obtain high resolution and accurate measure of our surface and groundwater resources. Since 2002, GRACE has been mapping monthly variations in water storage near the surface at low spatial resolution. SWOT will be launched later this year and is expected to map surface water resources with unprecedented accuracy at a high resolution. It is expected that SWOT data processing will present several challenges, such as it’s noise behaviour is still uncertain and it will have a gap of 20 km in the nadir direction that needs to be filled using interpolation. I have a PhD in Geodesy and experience in developing efficient post-processing strategies for handling GRACE data, which will help me develop novel methods for improving SWOT-derived surface water estimates. Furthermore, combining SWOT and GRACE can help us separate surfae water and groundwater, but it will be challenging due to differences in their spatiotemporal scales. I will use physically-based multivariate assimilation framework to obtain accurate estimates of groundwater changes. I have recently developed a multivariate model to artificially improve the spatial resolution of GRACE by incorporating estimates of water budget components and model simulations of terrestrial water storage changes. Another challenge in hydro-climatology is that we need long timeseries for assessing the impact of climate change, I will attempt finding highly correlated hydrometeorological proxies that can help us extend surface water and groundwater timeseries. Results from this project will provide superior Earth observation datasets concerning water resources, and will help us identify regions experiencing severe changes in water availability. The outputs have the potential to inform policy and push the boundaries of our contemporary scientific understanding. |
Total Budget (INR): | 16,85,816 |
Organizations involved