Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
PhD., Climate Studies

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
M Tech., Water Resource Engineering
Performed hydrological modeling of five Himalayan river basins using Variable Infiltration Capacity(VIC) model integrated with a temperature-index approach based glacier-melt model. The glacier-melt model was implemented on each glacier separately and incorporated the effect of hypsometry and aspect of glaciers. Model was calibrated with the the basin-wide mass balance and observed discharge. Estimated the contribution of the different components, viz. rainfall-runoff, snow-melt and glacier-melt from clean and debri-covered glaciers, to discharge. Studied the variation in magnitude and onset-decay times of different contributors in the central and western Himalayas. Acquired a good understanding of hydrological modelling in the Himalayas and the challenges we need to address in the field.

National Institute of Technology Hamirpur
B Tech., Civil Engineering
Analyzed the efficiency of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique to forecast rainfall and model runoff in Himalayan catchments. A single-layer feed-forward network and a Multilayer feed-forward network were used their network architectures were based on bias-variance trade-off. The legitimacy of models was decided based on their mean squared error and coefficient of correlation in the testing period. This project was an introduction to machine learning techniques for me.
Characterized Quantitative morphometry of drainage basins of Hamirpur district of Himachal Pradesh. Studied linear aspects - such as stream order, stream number, bifurcation ratio and drainage frequency -, areal aspects - such as elongation ratio, form factor and circulatory ratio - and relief aspects of Himalayan catchments. GIS software ArcGIS by ESRI was used for the processing of digital elevation models to extract morphometric parameters. I understood the potential of remote sensing products and GIS through this project

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Junior Researcher
Performed statistical downscaling of multiple CMIP5 GCMs over India. The project was aimed at downscaling the multiple variables for 21st century required as inputs for hydrological models (like; VIC, SWAT, etc.) particularly for climate change assessment, and develop a web-based database that would be open source to the hydrological community.

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Intern
The project aimed at estimating emissions from different types of wastewater treatment plants in India. Estimated emissions from "Activated Sludge Process" based wastewater treatment plant. Adopted an empirical method that calculated emissions from Bio-treatment, Sludge treatment, Sludge reuse, Chemical usage, Power Consumption and Biogas Usage based on biochemical properties of wastewater. Wastewater samples were collected from different wastewater treatment plant in India, biochemical properties were estimated for input into our model. This two-month experience made me realize the joys of research and the excitement of finding something new.

Chandel V. S., and Ghosh, S. Components of Himalayan River Flows in a Changing Climate. Water Resources Research, e2020WR027589.

Chandel V. S., Saini S., Jain D. K., Chauhan T. A., Bisaria N., and Shankar V., Morphometric analysis of five watersheds of Hamirpur district, Himachal Pradesh, 3rd International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Built Environment, 2017 (ICES’17), VIT University, Vellore

Shekhawat K.P., Chauhan T. A., Chandel V. S., and Shankar V., Inflow forecasting of Teesta-V reservoir, India, using ARIMA, ANN and ANFIS model, Civil Engineering Conference – Innovation for Sustainability (CEC – 2016), NIT Hamirpur

Secured an All India Rank of 82 in Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) exam.
Awarded with the SJVN Silver Jubilee Merit Scholarship.