Researcher of the Month

Dr. Praveen Kumar

Professor Praveen Kumar, a CWACES affiliate, is a member of the Hydrosystems lab, which is part of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC. He is a well accomplished researcher, with many funded grants and appointments through the years. Prior to arriving in Champaign-Urbana in 1995, Dr. Kumar received a M.S. in Civil Engineering from Iowa State University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1993. His Master’s work focused on the stochastic modeling of spatial rainfall patterns, while his Ph.D. dissertation was entitled, “Multiscale study of rainfall fields via wavelet transforms for identifying scaling characteristics.” From 1993-1995, he was a research scientist in the Hydrologic Science branch at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on land surface modeling for hydroclimatic prediction. Dr. Kumar is also presently a UIUC Faculty Fellow with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications housed on campus.

Hydrology has been the primary research focus of Dr. Kumar since arriving at the U of I, an offshoot of his belief that the water cycle is “the hand that weaves the fabric of life on the planet”. As a scientist, he has focused on achieving a greater understanding of the feedbacks between land and atmosphere and how they result in the self-sustaining patterns of terrestrial ecosystems. He has then used this broader comprehension to improve the predictability of these systems to facilitate sustainable actions. His program has been dominated by several primary themes. One theme has been to explore the non-linearity in hydrology, important for comprehending and forecasting numerous hydrologic phenomena. A second theme has been to demonstrate that hydrologic system memory generated by terrestrial moisture and heat storage variability, plus atmospheric recycling, perform important roles in coupled land-vegetation-atmosphere system interactions. A third theme has been the creation of computational methods to represent multivariate-multidimensional data available to examine relationships that characterize ecohydrologic processes. These research themes have incorporated information from and contributed to the topical areas of hydroclimatology, geomorphology, hydroinformatics, and remote sensing.

Dr. Kumar has had numerous projects funded during his tenure at the U of I. Examples include a project characterizing the multiscale interaction of hydrologic processes using multisensor satellite data (funded by NASA); examining the principles of large-scale hydrologic response through the linkage of hydroclimatology and river basin dynamics (funded by NSF); the multiscale estimation, error propogation and scale effects in the dynamical response of soil-moisture data assimilation (funded by NASA); the interannual variability of the hydrologic cycle in North America (funded by NSF); the influence of deep-rooted vegetation environments on climate predictability (funded by NOAA); and, interactions between water, energy and carbon dynamics as predictors of canopy to ecosystem scale vegetation pattern and function in a changing environment (funded by NSF). In addition to grants received, Dr. Kumar has been editor for several journals and papers, and is presently the editor for Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

Dr. Kumar believes that human impact, via climate change and infrastructure development, is causing alterations to water cycle variability. Subsequently, he anticipates his future research questions to be dominated by the quest for how biologically significant variability of the water cycle produces the observed emergent patterns of vegetation in space and time, and how vegetation interacts with terrestrial and atmospheric moisture to advance water cycle and climate system variability, which are topics not previously addressed in great detail. Connected to these goals, Dr. Kumar is co-principal investigator (with Murugesu Sivapalan, Bruce Rhoads, and Don Wuebbles) on a recently funded NSF initiative entitled "Water Cycle Dynamics in a Changing Environment: Advancing Hydrologic Science through Synthesis," for which he functions as a group leader to help better understand hydrosphere-biosphere interactions. On another theme in this project he is involved with the construction of an artificial hillslopes at Biosphere 2 in Arizona, a ten year experiment to study how vegetation interacts with landscape patterns, form and function. Dr. Kumar sees the overall NSF project as a community venture and a showcase for the hydrologic community to demonstrate how multi-disciplinary synthesis can advance hydrologic knowledge. He hopes that the success of this project will lead to the creation of a center for hydrologic synthesis. He also believes that CWACES is in a unique position to foster synthesis activities on campus and to provide a framework for interdisciplinary collaborations.