Research Projects

The coastal oceans and blue economy support livelihoods of tens of millions of people in India. Byvarious estimates, the coastal ocean contributes to 1% of the overall GDP of the country and is growing.With such a high reliance on the coastal ecosystem, it is extremely important to monitor and predict thehealth of our oceans with an emphasis on the impact of human activities. Ocean forecasts can beutilized for informing sustainable decisions about human activities such as fishing, shipping, security andsurveillance that affect the coastal oceans. In this context, the MoES has invested in high quality ocean observation systems over the past severalyears. Several ocean observation campaigns have also been undertaken giving us access tounprecedented high-quality data. However, the processes of interest are multiscale and the dataavailable, even after all the best efforts, is but a sparse representation in space and time. As such,estimating the initial and boundary conditions, parameters and closure models for numerical oceanforecasting is laden with uncertainties. What is required now is to assimilate all the data collected overthe last several years and those being collected in real-time to improve high-resolution synopticforecasts of the ocean state. Moreover, a synergic blend of dynamical understanding with data isneeded using mathematically sound statistical machine learning principles. Additionally, the utility ofdifferent observing systems must be established to finetune national observation plans. Towards thisend, data-driven dynamics-based feature models must be developed. The data assimilation methodsmust respect the nonlinearity of the governing ocean primitive equations and the non-Gaussian, non-stationary statistical distributions of the multiscale ocean features. To do so, the focus must shift fromestimating a covariance matrix from linearized or low-rank ensembles to new methods that accuratelydescribe the uncertainties in a dynamical subspace and propagate those using accurate numericalschemes