Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Rajagopalan Balaji

Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering

Headshot of Rajagopalan Balaji
Education
  • Ph.D., Utah State University, 1995
Office Location
ECCE - ECOT 444
Email
Rajagopalan.Balaji@colorado.edu
Phone
303-492-5968

Research Interests

My main research program is a diverse and interdisciplinary effort to enable sustainable water quantity and quality for the growing populations under increasing climate variability and change. This entails three interconnected themes: (i) Understanding the large-scale climate drivers of year-to-year and multidecadal variability and predictability of regional hydroclimatology and their extremes, (ii) Developing ensemble hydroclimate projection tools with large-scale climate information and, (iii) Coupling the projections with resources management and decision support system. In addition, I have keen interests in paleo and contemporary variability of Indian monsoon, big-data analysis and modeling techniques, water and wastewater quality, construction safety and building energy efficiency.

Current Research

  • Understanding and reconstructing the variability of Indian monsoon and hydrology and, tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures during Holocene
  • Spatial and temporal variability of summer rainfall over southwestern U.S
  • Impact of droughts on response to drinking water quality mediated through watershed changes
  • Wastewater quality (nutrient) modeling using statistical learning techniques, exploring the potential for nutrient trading, centralized and decentralized systems
  • Lessons from the rise and fall of past societies in response to climate variations, for applications to contemporary natural resource management problems
  • Improving ensemble precipitation forecasts at subseasonal time scales for enhancing the skill of hydrologic forecasts
  • Modeling climate extremes under current and future climate variability at selected National Parks, to mitigate risk of park infrastructure
  • Space-time variability of Arctic sea-ice – understanding and predicting the various attributes

Research Categories

Climate and Weather, Water Resources

Research Images

Correlation Maps of Indian rainfall

Correlation Maps

Correlation maps of Indian rainfall with moist static energy (MSE) and sea surface temperatures (SST) Full caption in DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060429
graphic of Forecasted Rainfall Anomalies

Forecasted Rainfall Anomalies

Observed, modeled, and forecasted standardized rainfall anomalies. Full caption in DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060429
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