Dhruva Kathuria
(Research Scientist)
| Email: | dhruva.kathuria@nasa.gov |
| Org Code: | |
| Address: |
NASA/GSFC Mail Code 618 Greenbelt, MD 20771 |
| Employer: | MORGAN STATE UNIV. |
Current Projects
VSWIR-PLANTS Database
Ecosystem function
Ongoing cross-center NASA initiative between JPL and GSFC compiling paired airborne spectra and plant functional trait measurements from field campaigns into a standardized database with associated metadata and uncertainty characterization.
NASA Sea Level Change Team
Cryosphere / Earth's Ice Cover
Developing calibration approaches to improve uncertainty quantification in projections of future mass change of ice sheets and glaciers.
Atmospheric Uncertainty Characterization for TIR Missions
Radiative Transfer
Leveraging GMAO’s Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS-FP) atmospheric ensembles for better atmospheric uncertainty characterization for land surface temperature retrievals for TIR missions.
Flash Droughts
Hydrology / Water Cycle
Enhancing flash drought prediction by improving process representation, parameterization, and data assimilation within the land surface model Noah-MP in LIS. Focused on targeted improvements in incorporating plant hydraulics in Noah-MP and assimilating vegetation related hyperspectral indices from PACE.
Positions/Employment
Assistant Research Scientist
GESTAR II - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office - Greenbelt, MD
July 2025 - Present
Postdoctoral Research Associate
GESTAR II - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office - Greenbelt, MD
April 2022 - June 2025
Grants
Mapping the spectral colors of blooming deserts with EMIT
ROSES 2023 A.32 Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) Science and Applications Team - NASA - Awarded: 2024-02-01
Dates: -
Enhancing flash drought prediction by quantifying vegetation responses to rainfall and heatwave pulses
ROSES 24 A.63 Ecohydrology - NASA - Awarded: 2026-05-01
Dates: -
Publications
Refereed
2026. "Reconciling remote sensing and reanalysis land surface temperatures: How surface conditions shape systematic differences between GOES-16 and MERRA-2 across the contiguous US.", Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, [10.1175/jamc-d-25-0171.1] [Journal Article/Letter]
2025. "Deriving hydrological inferences from a machine learning model to understand the physical drivers of flow duration curves.", Journal of Hydrology, 665 134687 [10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.134687] [Journal Article/Letter]
2025. "A Bayesian Approach to Hyperspectral Leaf Trait Prediction with uncertainty quantification.", Ecological Applications, [10.31223/x53b3x] [Journal Article/Letter]
2025. "Deciphering the spectra of flowers to map landscape‐scale blooming dynamics.", Ecosphere, 16 (2): [10.1002/ecs2.70127] [Journal Article/Letter]
2024. "Texas Water Observatory: A Distributed Network for Monitoring Water, Energy, and Carbon Cycles under Variable Climate and Land Use on Gulf Coast Plains.", Journal of Hydrometeorology, 25 (11): 1679-1695 [10.1175/jhm-d-23-0201.1] [Journal Article/Letter]
2021. "Identifying barriers to adoption of irrigation scheduling tools in Rio Grande Basin.", Smart Agricultural Technology, 1 100016 [10.1016/j.atech.2021.100016] [Journal Article/Letter]
2019. "Multiscale Data Fusion for Surface Soil Moisture Estimation: A Spatial Hierarchical Approach.", Water Resources Research, 55 (12): 10443-10465 [10.1029/2018wr024581] [Journal Article/Letter]
2019. "Gap Filling of High‐Resolution Soil Moisture for SMAP/Sentinel‐1: A Two‐Layer Machine Learning‐Based Framework.", Water Resources Research, 55 (8): 6986-7009 [10.1029/2019wr024902] [Journal Article/Letter]
2019. "A Nonstationary Geostatistical Framework for Soil Moisture Prediction in the Presence of Surface Heterogeneity.", Water Resources Research, 55 (1): 729-753 [10.1029/2018wr023505] [Journal Article/Letter]