about

Jwojalapa, Namaste, Hello! I'm Prabhakar and welcome to my web.

research

Modeling Earth Systems, Data, Visualization

Dhunge Dhara ('Hiti' in Newari) or Stone taps are omnipresent in Kathmandu Valley, most of which, used to have perennial water supply but only few are functional in the core of the valley due to rapid urbanization and anthropogenic disturbances of water channels, preferential groundwater flow paths including uncontrolled groundwater abstraction.

Infact, all Dhunge Dhara are fed by either Rajkulos (water channels from foothills) or local groundwater sources. Thus groundwater recharge of the hills and the valley itself is important for steady supply of water in these spouts, which mostly occurs during monsoon rainfall (June-July-August-September) every year after year. Besides synoptical scale oscilations, this distinct monsoon rainfall is heavily modulated by the local surrounding hills, and anthropogenic activity (e.g., changing land use and land cover, and the regional buildup of aerosol loading during the pre-monsoon and monsoon season).

With rapid urbanization and changing of fertile crop lands into urban areas, we are not only changing the day/night temperature and humidity, but also the surface runoff and groundwater flow. And, the emissions from urban areas are also changing the aerosol physical and chemical properties over the valley. Directly/indirectly via multiple feedback processes, we are perturbing the terrestrial water cycle. This is the story of my city, but these perturbations are present in all regions with human footprint. Understanding the effect of these pertubations is important to improve predictions for weather and climate. I use numerical modeling, observations and data assimilation to better understand the physical processes by which these pertubation affect the terrestrial water cycle.

You can find more about my research work from the following links

ORCID: 0000-0002-0840-0717 , Google Scholar: Profile

Useful Downloads

Porting of CLM5.0 to JSC machines
R scripts for fitting CCN spectra ~ f(U,T,P)
CDO tools to interpolate and analyze BIG DATA
QuickView of ParFlow Binary Files (viewPFB), need CISL NCL and ncview installed