Dr. Venugopal Vuruputur is presently a faculty member in the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras, all in Civil Engineering (with specialization in Hydrology). Since joining CAOS, Dr. Vuruputur and his students have focused on characterizing the multiscale space-time structure of tropical rainfall and its variability. More recently, he has also been exploring hydrology-oriented problems, including estimation and simulation of surface and subsurface storage and their variability in the Ganges-Brahmaputra River system, coupled with analyzing geochemical markers upstream of the river to better characterize and understand landslide-triggered flash floods. He was an Associate Editor of Water Resources Research during the period 2013-2017 and has been on the review editorial board of Frontiers in Atmospheric Sciences since 2015. He has also been a member of national and regional committees related to cloud seeding experiments in India, and water resources management.
During his stint as a Fulbright-Kalam fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in collaboration with Prof. Jin-Yi Yu of the Department of Earth Science, Dr. Vuruputur proposes to identify and robustly characterize pathways from the midlatitudes that can potentially modulate the sub seasonal variability of the Indian monsoon, especially in the early and late phases of the season.