Cohort Level: Cohort - I

Career Goal: Post graduating with a bachelors of Engineering in civil engineering, I plan to work as a structural engineer and pursue a Master's of Structural Engineering or perhaps an MBA. (I'm not sure yet.)

Expected Graduation Date: June 1, 2019

Degree: B.E Civil Engineering

Research Title: Multivariate Water Stress Forecasting System An Integrated Approach for Mitigating Agricultural Risks in the United States

Research Synopsis: Water stress and droughts can greatly hinder the agricultural sector in the United States. The forecast of such water stress can therefore assist farmers and stakeholders for the upcoming agricultural seasons. We introduce an integrated regional multivariate agricultural forecasting system that directly relates to farmer’s decision making and risk mitigation such as the decision time table for irrigation scheduling and pre-season crop choices. These multi-scale risk attributes include mutually dependent and spatially disaggregated cumulative water deficit and the rate of emergence and recession of stress that directly inform potential irrigation water requirements for crops. Given that these attributes exhibit mutual dependence across space and time, we explored common ocean-atmospheric tele-connections as the primary causal variables for developing the forecasts. A k-nearest neighbor based algorithm with an embedded non-parametric copula is used to develop the forecast system for the main agricultural regions in the country.