Overview
I am a doctoral researcher in earth sciences majorly focusing on understanding and quantifying global groundwater volumes and storage variability towards ensuring sustainability of the resource.
Research
Research interests
I am majorly interested in hydrogeology, hydrogeophysics and geostatistics research themes.
Thesis
Improving global estimates of groundwater storage variability by integrating models, in-situ observations and remotely-sensed data.
Groundwater is a vital resource supplying at least 50% of the global population with drinking water and accounts for over 40% of the water used for irrigation thereby supporting a significant proportion of global food production. Understanding the volumes and variability in groundwater storage is a key to managing groundwater sustainably. Large scale hydrological, land surface and Earth system models are routinely used for this purpose. However, although some comparison with remote sensing (RS) products such as GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) are becoming more common, these models remain un-validated against in-situ observational groundwater data. As a result, there is currently no standardised acceptable framework for constraining the relationships between climate change and changes to freshwater groundwater fluxes globally or to constrain uncertainties associated with the groundwater storage change estimates/predictions of large scale hydrological models.
This PhD research fills this gap by developing new methodologies to consistently compare/combine in-situ groundwater data with model outputs and GRACE data.
Funding source
Cardiff University Vice Chancellor's International Scholarships for Research Excellence
