Subimal Ghosh

Subimal Ghosh is Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Convener of the Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay with research interests in hydrology and hydro-climatology. ^[1] He obtained PhD degree in 2007 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on a thesis titled "Hydrologic Impacts of Climate Change: Uncertainty Modelling", and ME degree in 2004 from the same institute.

Subimal Ghosh was born in Kolkata, India, in 1979 and completed his schooling at Ramakrishna Vivekananda Mission Vidyabhawan, Barrackpore, West Bengal. His father, Mr. Subir Kumar Ghosh, was a government service holder, and his mother, Late Mrs. Supriya Ghosh, was a housewife. Though not attached to any academic or scientific profession, his mother was extremely passionate about science & mathematics and taught him those subjects till standard 10. After completion of schooling, Subimal joined Jadavpur University for his Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering. He secured All India Rank 39 in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for the Master of Engineering. He completed his ME and Ph.D. from IISc, Bangalore, in 2004 and 2007. He did his ME project and Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. P P Mujumdar. Prof. Mujumdar was an excellent mentor of Subimal not only for his Ph.D. but for his entire career. He got Prof. N S Govinda Rao gold medal best Ph.D. thesis award from IISc Bangalore and joined the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay immediately after completing his Ph.D. He received the BOYSCAST fellowship from DST in 2010 and spent six months at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, with Prof. Auroop Ganguly. Working with Prof. Ganguly was excellent training for him to perform high impact research. Since his Ph.D. days, he has been collaborating with his colleague and friend, Prof. Subhankar Karmakar. Many of his research resulted from the discussion and collaboration with him. Subimal is fortunate to have Prof. Raghu Murtugudde as one of his colleagues and collaborators, a visiting Professor at his institute. The interactions with him were amazing that enlightened him with newer areas of research. During his student life, Subimal met his life partner, Chaitali Misra. Her selfless love, support, and sacrifice helped him to shape his career.

With Family

Subimal with his Mother

Subimal Ghosh works specifically in the areas of Indian Summer Monsoon and its extremes with regional modeling, land-atmosphere interactions in the South Asian monsoon regions, improving predictions of monsoon characteristics using innovative dynamic-statistical modeling and assessing impacts of climate variability & changes on water resources in India. His rich research contributions are evidenced by the quality of publications in high impact journals, such as Nature Climate Change, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Geophysical Research Letters, Scientific Reports, Environmental Research Letters, Water Resources Research, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Hydrology, Advances in Water Resources, Journal of Climate and Journal of Hydrometeorology. Subimal started working in hydrometeorology since his Ph.D. when He developed statistical techniques for modeling regional climate addressing model uncertainty. He continued his work during the post-PhD period and at the same time started focussing on understanding feedback from the land to the atmosphere. The work started in collaboration with Prof. Praveen Kumar of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Subimal’s most significant contribution is understanding land-atmosphere interaction in the complex South Asian Summer Monsoon System. Monsoon was traditionally believed to be impacted by large scale patterns and the contributions from land sources were neglected in literature, before Subimal published a breakthrough work in Journal of Hydrometeorology that showed 20%-25% of the moisture contributing to precipitation in India during the end of summer monsoon have terrestrial origin. In his subsequent publications, he showed the contributions from land towards inter-annual and intra-seasonal variabilty of summer monsoon. With a better understanding of moisture circulation processes and land contributions Subimal improved the monsoon simulation using regional coupled land-atmosphere model resulting in a reduction in dry bias over India, which was an unresolved problem associated with monsoon circulation. This work was published in Geophysical Research Letters and was selected as the Research Spotlight of AGU. With the improved understanding of the processes related with monsoon circulations, Subimal has also derived physics guided data-driven statistical dynamical model for monsoon onset.

With PhD Supervisor Prof. P P Mujumdar and friend & collaborator Prof. Subhankar Karmakar

Receiving ISCA Young Scientist Award

With TPCC AR6 Working Group 1, Chapter 11 Team

Subimal has made significant contributions in the area of meteorological extremes. His work on increasing spatial variability of monsoon extremes in India and the possibility of associations with local drivers stands apart as a unique contribution. This work published in Nature Climate Change initiated several follow on studies by his research group and other researchers worldwide. His work on the increase of widespread extremes over Central India and land surface processes being the second highest contributors to such increases has been published in Nature Communications. This has reestablished the significant role of land surface processes on monsoon rainfall. An increase in urban precipitation and urban flooding has been one of India's major disasters, resulting in huge human and financial loss. Subimal has performed a number of analyses highlighting urban feedback phenomena and the resulting increase in extreme urban precipitation. He has also shown the role of urban morphology and an urban structure in generating eddies that results in instabilities with intensification on extremes in few urban pockets and increase in spatial variability. Subimal has also made significant contributions in terms of developing new algorithms for statistical downscaling and uncertainty model for assessing impacts of climate change on river basin scale hydrology. At present Subimal has started working on developing India specific modules related to irrigation, water management and glaciers that may be used in the state of the art hydrological models that are developed based on Western countries' water practices. In recognition of his significant research contributions, Subimal has been selected as a Lead Author of Chapter 11 (Weather and Climate Extremes), Working Group 1 of IPCC Assessment Report 6 (AR6). In 2015, the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India asked him to lead a project on the development of India’s first integrated real-time urban flood forecasting system that involves a consortium of 30 scientists from 7 institutes (academia and R&D organizations in India). Subimal Ghosh has successfully led and completed the project within a record time of one and a half years. The forecasting system is now implemented in Chennai, India. The project includes meteorological forecasts, tidal forecasts, upstream hydrologic forecasts, up-stream reservoir release, 3-way coupled urban flood modeling, real time meteorological and hydrologic monitoring with sensors and integration of all to a 3-D visualization platform. At present, Subimal is working with the farmers of drought prone Maharashtra and developing technologies for sustainable irrigation management. Further, Subimal and his collaborators have developed a unique method of combining the statistical downscaling products and socio-economic vulnerability information towards the generation of adaptation options for India's villages. Subimal is currently focusing on understanding the earth system as a whole, considering the interactions between the four spheres, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. His primary hypothesis is that a change in any sub-system of any of the spheres may potentially perturb the entire system through intercating links of forcings and feedback. Subimal Ghosh has been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in the Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences. He is the recipient of the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology. He also got the prestigious Devendra Lal Memorial Medal from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He is a coferred fellow of AGU.

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 2019.^[2]

Awards and recognitions[]

The awards and honours conferred on Subimal Ghosh include:

• Institute Chair Professor from March 2021.
• American Geophysical Union Devendra Lal Memorial Award in 2020 for “outstanding Earth and/or space sciences research by a scientist belonging to and working in a developing country” ^[3]
• Conferred Fellow of American Geophysical Union
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2019 in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences^[2]
• Swarnajayanti Fellowship 2018-19 in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
• Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group – I for Assessment Report 6 (2018-22)
• National Academy of Science India (NASI) Platinum Jubilee Young Scientist Award 2013 in Electronics, Computer and Engineering Sciences
• Young Scientist Award 2012 from Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in Engineering and Technology,
• Indian National Academy of Engineers (INAE) Young Engineer Award 2011.

References[]

External links[]

• Subimal Ghosh publications indexed by Google Scholar
• ORCID
• Subimal Ghosh in Publon