Blog
2026
The PI presented an invited talk (online) on “AI driven streamflow prediction in Regulated Basins” at the FAR-SEE 2026 event on AI/ML applications in physical sciences at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL). The talk focused on the performance of LSTM models in streamflow estimation with a special focus on regulated basins. Mr. Maitra Tiwari, who was a summer intern in 2026 played a major role in developing the LSTM systems and running various experiments for comparison of training and evaluation on unregulated vs. regulated systems.
Summer of 2026 was a productive period, with the RIVER lab hosting two interns, who tirelessly worked to uncover interesting insights on large-sample hydrology and satellite remote sensing of reservoirs using the SWOT satellite. As a token of gratitude for their contribution and to celebrate their achievements through the summer, we shared lunch near the campus.
We welcome Ongkar Dasgupta to the RIVER Lab! Ongkar is pursuing a BTech in CSE at NIT Agartala and a BS in Electrical Systems at IIT Madras. He joins us as a summer intern and will be working on estimating reservoir dynamics of dams in South America using the SWOT satellite’s observations.
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.