Browsing by Author "Agarwal, Ankit"

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    Blacksburg to Guatemala Archive
    Joshi, Arth; Agarwal, Ankit; Crowson, John (2015-05-14)
    The primary objective of the Blacksburg to Guatemala Archive Project is to create a medium for cultural exchange between Christ Church, Blacksburg, and their sister parish in San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala. This project will create a website and will allow for these two parishes to remain in close contact following the recent visit of a delegation from Christ Church, Blacksburg, to Guatemala in January 2015. We are completing this project as soon as possible in order to minimize the delay between their visit and the establishment of such a cultural exchange. Both parishes will benefit from our project, satisfying a desire to remain in-touch and embrace cultural differences. We decided to use WordPress to offer the simplest possible solution. WordPress will allow the client to easily maintain stories on the website and will also give readers an easy way to enjoy them. We chose a simple theme and then further perfected it to reduce any complications. We decided to only display aspects that were absolutely necessary to the project. Aside from the stories, categories and search are the only other modules that are visible to the readers. The website also allows users to leave comments on every story so they can interact with the parishes in an easy way. Another big request from the client’s end was to allow for stories written in Spanish. We incorporated WordPress’s bilingual tools to support this functionality. Stories can be written in either language and they will be formatted appropriately. A search engine has also been implemented to display results in both English and Spanish. Overall, the website was a success. The primary focus was usability and the tests we ran proved the website was easy to use. The client was also happy with the results and can see the website being very useful to both parishes.
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    Inter-Comparison of Gauge-Based Gridded Data, Reanalysis and Satellite Precipitation Product with an Emphasis on Hydrological Modeling
    Setti, Sridhara; Maheswaran, Rathinasamy; Sridhar, Venkataramana; Barik, Kamal Kumar; Merz, Bruno; Agarwal, Ankit (MDPI, 2020-11-20)
    Precipitation is essential for modeling the hydrologic behavior of watersheds. There exist multiple precipitation products of different sources and precision. We evaluate the influence of different precipitation product on model parameters and streamflow predictive uncertainty using a soil water assessment tool (SWAT) model for a forest dominated catchment in India. We used IMD (gridded rainfall dataset), TRMM (satellite product), bias-corrected TRMM (corrected satellite product) and NCEP-CFSR (reanalysis dataset) over a period from 1998–2012 for simulating streamflow. The precipitation analysis using statistical measures revealed that the TRMM and CFSR data slightly overestimate rainfall compared to the ground-based IMD data. However, the TRMM estimates improved, applying a bias correction. The Nash–Sutcliffe (and R2) values for TRMM, TRMMbias and CFSR, are 0.58 (0.62), 0.62 (0.63) and 0.52 (0.54), respectively at model calibrated with IMD data (Scenario A). The models of each precipitation product (Scenario B) yielded Nash–Sutcliffe (and R2) values 0.71 (0.76), 0.74 (0.78) and 0.76 (0.77) for TRMM, TRMMbias and CFSR datasets, respectively. Thus, the hydrological model-based evaluation revealed that the model calibration with individual rainfall data as input showed increased accuracy in the streamflow simulation. IMD and TRMM forced models to perform better in capturing the streamflow simulations than the CFSR reanalysis-driven model. Overall, our results showed that TRMM data after proper correction could be a good alternative for ground observations for driving hydrological models.