Research Projects

Hydrologic drought-to-flood (DTF) transition refers to the transition of a dry state to a wet state of a catchment within a time scale. The time scale of this transition severely affects the water management, severity of the impact, and its associated implications for society. The main objectives are to understand the spatio-temporal evolution of the transitions, unravelling the underlying physical mechanisms through modelling, identifying drivers and their changing relationship in a nonstationary future time scale, the role of human activities in altering the properties of transitions, and strategies to cope with such transitions for effective water management. This study will be focused on the catchments in Peninsular India using the daily time series datasets of hydrometeorological variables from CAMELS-IND (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14005378). Initially, a data-driven investigation will be carried out to identify hydrologic DTF events in the historical time period. Process-based hydrological models and data-driven models will be trained with the observed data to identify relevant hydrological processes and the mechanisms of the DTF events. The spatial patterns and the drivers of the synchronous behaviour of DTF events will be quantified using complex network approaches and allied metrics. The GCM forcings will be fed into hydrological models and data-driven models to simulate the DTF events in the near-future (2030 – 2050) and far-future (2050-2100). Lastly, the impact of DTF events on agricultural productivity and suggestions for effective mitigation of such events will be provided. The DTF transitions are very impactful events based on the time scale of the transition and the sector it impacts. There is a plethora of studies where drought and flood events are studied independently, and their risks are individually assessed. However, the transition of drought events to flood events remains less explored, and their impact on agricultural productivity is unclear. If the transition period is sufficiently small, it will pose a severe threat, especially to agricultural productivity/reservoir operation when flood happens within a small time frame after the end of droughts. The infrastructure may not sufficiently cope with such transitions on a short-term scale, and may adversely impact society. Furthermore, if the time scale of the transition is larger (at seasonal scale), the impact will be much different if it had happened on a smaller time scale. The causal drivers of transitions in both of these cases will be fundamentally different and have the potential to enhance the risk of individual flood or drought events. Therefore, DTF events need more research endeavour to unravel their causal dynamics, impacts, and associated risks for water management at a catchment scale.