Sulochana Gadgil, an eminent Indian meteorologist, died on July 24. She was 81. Gadgil contributed to the scientific understanding of the Indian monsoonal system, which has in turn become the foundation for projecting how climate change will impact the monsoonal system, and in turn the future of the South Asian region. Born in 1944 in Pune, Maharashtra, Gadgil did her schooling and initial university education in the city. She completed her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and worked as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA. In 1971, she joined the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) as a scientist. Two years later, she moved to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. She played a significant role in the establishment of the Centre for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences at IISc. “Perhaps the most important part of my education at Harvard and MIT was learning the art and science of modelling of complex systems from stalwarts in the field,” she wrote in an Indian Academy of Sciences publication. “This gave me the confidence to undertake modelling studies of not only the monsoon, but also of crops and to develop simple models for the impact of pests and diseases on crops in a variable climate.” Her foremost contribution to the understanding of the Indian monsoonal system was to define that the movement of the rainclouds from south to north, and back, which went beyond the till-then believed to be movement of winds…This article was originally published on Mongabay
