Seminar title: Global Terrestrial Water Storage Reconstruction Using Cyclostationary Empirical Orthogonal Functions (1979–2020)

FLAME University is organizing a seminar on Global Terrestrial Water Storage Reconstruction Using Cyclostationary Empirical Orthogonal Functions (1979–2020) on Wednesday, January 18, 2023 from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm at Ramanujan 101 at FLAME University. Prof Hrishikesh Chandapurkar will be delivering the seminar on this topic dealing with the critical issue of water stress at the global level.

Satellite-based remote sensing methods provide invaluable observations of climate variables. However, several satellite missions are quite recent. Is it possible to use the covariability between climate variables and the longer records of some climate variables to extend the record of some recent missions? 

Since 2002, Terrestrial water storage (TWS) anomalies derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission have been useful for several earth science applications, ranging from global earth system science studies to regional water management. However, the relatively short record of GRACE has limited its use in understanding the climate-driven interannual-to-decadal variability in TWS. 

In a recently published study, these timescales were targeted and a novel method of cyclostationary empirical orthogonal functions (CSEOFs) was applied along with the covariability of TWS with precipitation and temperature to reconstruct the TWS record for 1979–2020. 

Based on the above, the seminar will highlight the following:

• GRACE mission, it’s usefulness to society and earth system sciences
• CSEOF analysis -a special case of EOF analysis (which is also known as principal component analysis in other disciplines) that better accommodates the quasi periodicity of the covarying patterns
• Study methods and the generic rationale behind them
• Potential use of the resultant reconstruction in separating human- and climate-driven changes in the water storage


About the speaker: 
Prof. Hrishikesh Arvind Chandanpurkar is a Fellow at Centre for Sustainability, Environment, and Climate Change, FLAME University, and a consultant to the World Bank, Washington DC. He received a PhD in Earth System Sciences from University of California, Irvine in 2016, and has conducted research at NASA / Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, USA), Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (Boulder, USA), and Global Institute for Water Security (Saskatoon, Canada). Currently for the World Bank, he is contributing to an upcoming flagship report on the observed changes in the global water resources and their implications for the socio-ecological systems.