Image of mountains one of them snowcapped and the other rocky with some snow

Department of
Earth and Climate Science

Photo of Argha  Banerjee

Argha Banerjee

Associate Professor and Deputy Chair, Earth and Climate Science

Earth and Climate Science

Himalayan glaciers

argha@iiserpune.ac.in

Argha Banerjee obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 2010 from TIFR, Bombay. He was a postdoctoral fellow at IMSc, Chennai, and INSPIRE faculty fellow at IISER Kolkata before joining IISER Pune in 2015.

Research

Himalayan glaciers Argha is interested in a range of problems related to Himalayan glaciers, with a broader objective of contributing to a quantitative understanding of the co-evolution of the Himalayan ice, water, climate and landscape. Some of the specific problems being studied are decadal to millennialscale variability of Himalayan glaciers, impacts of supraglacial debris-cover on the recent ice-loss in the Himalaya, the sensitivity of the glaciers on meteorological forcing, hydrology of Himalayan catchments, mountainglacier contribution to sea-level rise, and erosional evolution of fluvial and glacial landscapes. He uses computer simulations, field experiments, and remote-sensing methods to address the issues.

Selected Publications

Pankaj Kumar, M S Saharwardi, Argha Banerjee, M F Azam, Aditya K Dubey, Raghu Murtugudde (2019). Snowfall Variability Dictates Glacier Mass Balance Variability in Himalaya-Karakoram, Scientific Reports, 9: 18192.

Sunil S Singh, Argha Banerjee, Harish C Nainwal, R Shankar (2019). Estimation of the total subdebris ablation from point-scale ablation data on a debris-covered glacier, Journal of Glaciology, 65 (253): 759-769.

Argha Banerjee, Tejal Shirsat, and Reshama Kumari (2018). Prevalence of power‐law profiles in passive margin escarpments, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 123: 1699–1709.

Argha Banerjee, and Bilal A Wani (2018). Exponentially decreasing erosion rates protect the highelevation crests of the Himalaya, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 497, 22.

Argha Banerjee (2017). Brief communication: Thinning of debris-covered and debris-free glaciers in a warming climate, The Cryosphere, 11 (1): 133.