Research Projects

The proposed research aims to address the growing challenge of summer-season water scarcity in the Indian parts of the Indus Water Treaty Western Basins—specifically the Chenab, Jhelum, and Indus rivers—by developing an integrated framework to assess the occurrence, interaction, and hydrological impacts of compound drought events. These basins are governed by snowmelt in the upper reaches and soil moisture and rainfall variability in the mid- and lower catchments, making them vulnerable to both snow droughts and flash or traditional droughts. Recent evidence suggests that the simultaneous or sequential occurrence of these drought types can severely reduce surface water availability during the pre-monsoon and summer months, yet their combined effects remain poorly understood. The project hypothesizes that compound snow and soil moisture droughts significantly influence surface water and total water storage anomalies and that these impacts can be detected and quantified using satellite remote sensing and reanalysis products. The research will be structured around three major work packages: WP1 will characterize wet and dry snow droughts using satellite-derived snow cover, SWE, and land surface temperature data with deep learning-based super-resolution downscaling; WP2 will identify traditional and flash droughts using soil moisture and evapotranspiration data and analyze their interactions with upstream snow droughts; WP3 will assess surface water extent using MODIS, Landsat, and Sentinel imagery and link observed hydrological changes to drought drivers. Integration of all work packages will enable the identification of compound drought hotspots and causal pathways. The main experiments involve satellite-based anomaly detection, drought classification using standardized indices, lag and cluster analysis of drought propagation, and mapping of drought footprints on surface water variability. If successful, the project will significantly advance current understanding by establishing a non-trivial linkage between cryospheric, terrestrial, and hydrological drought processes using data-independent methods. The outcomes will have broad applications in climate-resilient water management, particularly in snow-fed, data-scarce basins, by offering decision-support tools for prioritizing small-scale water infrastructure, drought mitigation strategies, and future planning under warming scenarios. The approach will be scalable to other transboundary river systems facing similar compound drought risks and will contribute valuable insights for scientific research, policy-making, and operational water governance in climate-sensitive regions.

Compound Droughts, Snow Drought, Flash Drought, Surface Water, Total Water Storage, Remote Sensing