Educational background Ph. D. (2021) Biological and Agricultural Engineering M.Tech., Water Resources & Environmental Engineering Indian Institute of Science, India (2015) B.Tech., Civil Engineering Punjab Engineering College, India (2012) CV/ Resume

Research Interests

Remote sensing, Hydrology, Multi-scale data fusion, Non-stationarity, Spatio-temporal statistics for massive datasets

Current project

The global burgeoning of environmental remote sensing datasets in the past decade holds a significant potential in improving our understanding of multi-scale hydrological dynamics. The primary issues that hinder the fusion of different data platforms are

• Massive size of datasets on a continental scale,
• Different spatial resolutions of the data platforms,
• Inherent spatial variability in environmental variables caused due to atmospheric and land surface controls and
• Measurement errors caused due to imperfect retrievals of remote sensing platforms.

I have recently developed a novel data fusion scheme which takes all the above factors into account using a spatial hierarchical model (SHM). An SHM enables coherent integration of data, science and uncertainties to make optimal predictions at unobserved locations using an underlying non-stationary geostatistical model.

The applicability of the hierarchical approach, however, is severely limited by huge datasets. To account for the massive size of the datasets at a continental scale, I am currently working on a novel extension of a likelihood approximation in a multi-scale multi-platform setting and its subsequent application to fuse in-situ soil moisture observations from SCAN and USCRN with satellite-derived soil moisture products from SMOS and SMAP for Contiguous USA (CONUS). The fusion scheme will be further extended to a multivariate setting to combine different components of the water cycle such as evapotranspiration, rainfall, soil moisture, and ground-water.

Awards, scholarships, & fellowships

• (2021) Graduate Oral Presentation Award (third place), UCOWR/ NIWR Annual Water Resources Conference
• (2020) Remote Sensing Technical Committee Award for paper presentation at AGU fall meeting
• (2019) Bill and Rita Stout International Graduate Student Achievement Award
• (2019) CUAHSI Hydroinformatics Conference Travel Award

List of select publications:

1. Kathuria, D., Mohanty, B. P. and Katzfuss, M. (2019). A nonstationary geostatistical framework for soil moisture prediction in the presence of surface heterogeneity. Water Resources Research. doi: 10.1029/2018WR023505
2. Kathuria, D., Mohanty, B.P. and Katzfuss, M., 2019. Multiscale data fusion for surface soil moisture estimation: a spatial hierarchical approach. Water Resources Research.
3. Mao, H., Kathuria, D., Duffield, N. and Mohanty, B.P., 2019. Gap Filling of High‐Resolution Soil Moisture for SMAP/Sentinel‐1: A Two‐Layer Machine Learning‐Based Framework. Water Resources Research, 55(8), pp.6986-7009.