MRUDULA G DR

Dr. Mrudula G, a Ph. D in Atmospheric Sciences is currently working as Senior Principal Scientist in Centre for Electromagnetics, CSIR-NAL. Prior to that, she was working in the Flosolver unit of CSIR-NAL.  She was associated with the Radar Development Group of ISRO before joining CSIR-NAL.

Dr. Mrudula is currently involved in the development, testing and certification of indigenous Lightning Protection Schemes (LPS) for airborne radomes and in the EM characterization of materials various applications.  She is associated with various radome development programmes sponsored by defense organizations. Further, she is working on the development attenuation and bias correction methods to reduce wet radome effects, in collaboration with India Meteorological Department. She is also working towards development of better terminal observations / forecasts for civil/defense airports and better route forecasts for various types of aircrafts. As part of the project on High Altitude Platform (HAP) Vehicle, she is involved in the analysis of surface and upper air parameters for deciding the location and time of the launch.

Dr. Mrudula was involved in the project “Interaction of Convective Organization and Monsoon Precipitation, Atmosphere, Surface and Sea (INCOMPASS)” as part of Government of India’s Indo – UK Collaboration initiative towards betterment of Monsoon forecasts. She was associated with various institutions such as IMD, NCMRWF, IIT’s, SAC, IISc, etc. in India and University of Leeds, University of Reading, UK Meteorological office, CEH etc. in UK. AS part of this project, algorithms for mesoscale convective systems (MCS) identification over the globe, cloud tracking, cloud cluster development and movement were developed. Dr. Mrudula was also associated with national monsoon mission aiming at an indigenous Indian monsoon model, for the development of a boundary layer module.

At Flosolver unit of CSIR-NAL, she was mainly focusing on improving the Varsha General Circulation Model (GCM) and its forecasts, for better accuracy by improving the physical schemes. She was also involved in the verification of the monsoon/cyclone forecasts and modifications in the model. She had developed new methods for Sea Surface Temperature (SST) prescription in global atmospheric models and a new monsoon onset criterion based on Vertically Integrated Moisture Transport (VIMT) using Varsha GCM.  She had developed web based softwares for visualization and verification of forecasts and observations from different sources.

Before joining NAL, she was involved in research and development of Doppler Weather Radar (DWR) products and making algorithms for primary and secondary DWR derived products, during her association with ISRO. As part of her thesis work, she had worked on understanding the features of the atmosphere during the passage of tropical cyclones using MST radar at Tirupati.  She was involved in developing algorithms for retrieval of altitude profiles of temperature over the tropics using MST Radar and Lidar, along with the team at University of Kerala and SPL, VSSC.

Dr. Mrudula has published more than 200 publications which include book, book chapters, journal papers, conference papers, restricted documents etc. She had participated and delivered lectures in many international/national conferences. One of her journal paper was recognized as top sited and top read/downloaded paper, by Elsevier. She was the recipient of the Best Woman Scientist Award from CSIR-NAL in the year 2019. She is identified as a subject expert for Meteorology by Union Public Service Commission. Dr. Mrudula is a reviewer for many journals and thesis examiner for various universities. As a faculty of ACSIR, she is involved in teaching of various subjects such as Applied Numerical Methods, Research Methodology, Atmospheric Electromagnetics, Atmospheric Dynamics and Computer Programming for Research. 

Research Interests

Atmospheric Physics and Dynamics

Numerical Weather Prediction/Modelling

Atmospheric Electromagnetics

Aviation Meteorology

Computational techniques