Sulochana Gadgil, 2022-02-24

Sulochana Gadgil was born on 7th June 1944, in Pune, Maharashtra. She did her primary education in a Marathi medium school in Pune, and her secondary schooling at Rishi Valley boarding school in Andhra Pradesh. She returned to Pune to pursue her undergraduate degree from Fergusson College. She then did her Masters in applied mathematics from Pune University. She did her Ph.D. at Harvard University in physical oceanography with Dr. Allan Robinson. After her Ph.D., she worked with Dr. Jule Charney on meteorology and monsoons. In 1971, she returned to India. She worked as a pool officer at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology for two years and began working on research related to the Indian monsoon. In 1973, she joined the Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as a meteorologist. She was involved in founding the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Studies at IISc in 1973, and remained at the centre till 2006. She’s worked on research questions related to the Indian monsoon and its variability, applying mathematical modelling to her research questions. Her work using satellite images helped describe northward propagations over the Indian Ocean, a discovery that overturned the popular land-sea breeze hypothesis for the Indian monsoon. She was also involved in projects such as the Monsoon Trough Boundary Layer Experiment (MONTBLEX, 1990) and the Bay of Bengal Monsoon Experiment (BOBMEX, 1999), collecting atmospheric information data on the Indian climate. She’s also researched the effects of the monsoon on agriculture and the economy. Her recent work involved studying the Indian Ocean Dipole and the EQUINOO.