We are a research group at the Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), IIT Bombay. We develop satellite remote sensing methods and open-source computational tools to monitor, model, and forecast the dynamics of rivers and reservoirs across the globe – with a focus on regions where ground data is scarce.
Research Themes
Global Reservoir Dynamics from Space
We use multi-satellite observations – optical, SAR, and radar altimetry – to track surface water storage dynamics of reservoirs worldwide. Our work integrates the recently launched SWOT mission with legacy sensors to push the frontier of reservoir monitoring accuracy and frequency.
Regulated River Hydrology & Open Software
We build satellite-driven frameworks – RAT, ResORR – to model how dams and reservoirs regulate downstream river flow. Our methods work without in-situ gauge data and are validated across transboundary river basins in South and Southeast Asia.
Forecast-Informed Water Management
We explore how weather forecast products can be coupled with satellite-based reservoir tracking to enable forecast-informed dam operations – with particular focus on flood-risk reduction in hydropower-dominated, data-sparse river basins.
Selected Publications
Latest News
2026
Mr. Maitra Tiwari, a student of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, NIT Raipur, joins the RIVER Lab. His work will focus on evaluating the performance of LSTMs for predicting streamflow.
2025
We welcome Shanta Panja to the RIVER Lab! Shanta joins us as a PhD student and will be investigating the estimation of groundwater seepage from reservoirs using satellite observables.
We are officially launching RIVER Lab at the Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), IIT Bombay. The lab will focus on satellite remote sensing of water bodies, regulated river hydrology, and open-source hydrological software. Positions for PhD students and research associates are open – see the Join page for details.
Our paper on multi-satellite tracking of surface water storage in the SWOT era is now published in Earth and Space Science. We show that SWOT achieves near-order-of-magnitude improvement in elevation RMSE over pre-SWOT approaches for reservoir storage estimation.
Our paper exploring forecast-informed dam operations in ungauged mountainous basins using GEFS and the RAT satellite framework is now published in Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (ASCE). We apply the framework to the 2018 Kerala floods as a globally representative test case.
The Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT) is now available as a conda-installable Python package with a command-line interface, CI/CD pipeline, and full documentation at ratdocs.io. The paper describing the package is published in Digital Water.
Affiliation
RIVER Lab is part of the Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India.