Australia (particularly southeast Australia) has experienced several multi-year droughts in the past. These droughts have resulted in emptying reservoirs and associated water mismanagement. One major cause of the mismanagement is due to the unrealistic water estimated by existing rainfall-runoff models used for water availability estimation. These models fail due to their simplistic structure where they do not account for several catchment mechanisms which drive the rainfall-runoff non-stationarity (i.e. runoff generated per unit rainfall in a catchment are different for contrasting climatic periods i.e. wet or dry). Proloy’s research investigates several catchment and climate associated mechanisms which govern the rainfall-runoff non-stationarity and include them into a robust framework of existing models for a realistic runoff simulation under rainfall-runoff non-stationarity.
Two of the mechanisms which govern the rainfall-runoff non-stationarity are land use change and surface water-groundwater interactions. The land use change is generally accounted for in the rainfall-runoff models, however, the surface water-groundwater interaction is not, and therefore, Proloy has developed and tested a new linked surface water-groundwater modelling approach which considers a rainfall-runoff model and a groundwater model and simulates the runoff. Proloy has also done a comparative study of models prior to selecting the appropriate rainfall-runoff and the groundwater models. His results indicate a significant improvement in runoff simulation under rainfall-runoff non-stationarity while using the linked surface water-groundwater modelling approach compared to stand-alone rainfall-runoff model simulated results. These findings will be highly applicable for proper water management under hydroclimatic variability in Australian catchments.
Proloy is supervised and co-supervised by Associate Prof. Anthony Kiem and Professor Garry Willgoose respectively, and he is close to the end of his PhD.
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Proloy has published two papers in the Journal of Hydrology, and two more papers are under review. These papers can be accessed via the following links:
Deb et al., 2019. Mechanisms influencing non-stationarity in rainfall-runoff relationships in southeast Australia. J. Hydrol. 571, 749-764.
Deb et al., 2019. A linked surface water-groundwater modelling approach to more realistically simulate rainfall-runoff non-stationarity in semi-arid regions. J. Hydrol. 575, 273-291.
Proloy also posses skills on climate change analysis, crop/agricultural modelling, groundwater modelling, and stochastic hydrology. He can be reached at debproloy@gmail.com or Proloy.Deb@uon.edu.au