Flooding affects the lives of billions of people globally and results in substantial economic losses. Such occurrences can significantly impact a nation's growth, particularly in developing countries with scarce resources and inadequate infrastructure. Nearly 1.81 billion people, or 23% of the world's population, live in areas at very high risk of flooding. Three hundred ninety million of this population resides in India. Brahmaputra and Ganga basins, which account for 60% of India's river flow, are the most flood-prone regions in India. Rivers in these basins are also known to shift laterally by excessive river bank erosion. People living in floodplains of these rivers have suffered a massive loss of agricultural land and homestead due to bank erosion processes. Hence it is crucial to develop a flood modeling framework incorporating the geomorphic evolution of the river basin alongside the latest satellite-based observations. Developments in science and technology in the past few decades have enabled us to monitor the Earth's surface from space using satellites. These vast databases, both in terms of time and space, offer the ability to address some of the primary concerns associated with floods and dampen their harmful impacts on society.

The first phase of my research focuses on the geomorphic analysis of major rivers in the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin over the past three decades using remote sensing and GIS to study relationships between river dynamics and other basin parameters. This phase is based on the foundation established by my MS project. We leverage the availability of Landsat imagery spanning the past three decades to extract the river channel masks. RivMAP toolbox is used to delineate the channel centerlines and estimate annual channel migration rates. Additionally, Digital Elevation Models from the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) mission and simulated river discharge data from the Global Streamflow and Flood Forecasting System (GEOGloWS) initiative are used to estimate other controlling variables in the basin. The correlation of migration rates with each variable is estimated. 

Building on an improved understanding of the relationship between river dynamics and basin parameters, my future work aims to develop a GIS-based real-time flood forecast model for the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin. The research progress will be regularly updated here.