Profile information for Sudhanshu Kumar

Short Bio

Sudhanshu Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate in the interdisciplinary Earth System Science program at Auburn University, advised by Dr. Di Tian in the Hydroclimate Research Group, Department of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Sciences. His research asks where the predictability of drought and soil moisture comes from, how far ahead it extends, and how to monitor it at the field scale. He uses causal discovery to identify the global drivers of flash droughts, traces how drought propagates from the atmosphere into soil moisture and vegetation, and develops deep learning models that estimate daily root-zone soil moisture at 30-m resolution. His work has appeared in Water Resources Research and Scientific Reports. In 2025, he was a LEAP Momentum Fellow at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on machine learning calibration of the Community Land Model. He has presented at AGU and EGU meetings, served as an early career session convener at both, and received the Auburn Research Symposium College Award for Poster Presentation (2025). He worked as a graduate teaching assistant in Deep Learning for Environmental Sciences, reviews for hydrology and climate journals, and serves on the AGU Hydrology Section Student Subcommittee. He holds an M.S. in Data Science and Engineering from Auburn and an M.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur.