Prajwal Khanal

Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, and Planet Labs, Haarlem, the Netherlands

Water Use and Drought: Ecohydrological Responses of Agricultural and Nature Ecosystems in the Netherlands (WUNDER)

• Producing soil moisture and fluxes at the field scale for agricultural drought monitoring in the Netherlands.

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

• Quantified the relative control of near-surface soil moisture vs. terrestrial water storage on global vegetation functioning, using satellite observation only (published in Biogeosciences).

Chair of Hydrology and River Basin Management, Technical University of Munich

• Produced flood inundation maps for the Ouémé River, Benin (FURIFLOOD) and the Naryn River, Kyrgyzstan (ÖkoFlussPlan), using HEC-RAS unsteady-flow models.

Jena-Geos Ingenieurbüro GmbH, Munich, Germany

• Built an Excel and VBA tool for greenhouse-gas accounting across stationary combustion, refrigeration and transport.

Executive Consulting Engineering and Planner (ECEP), Lazimpat, Kathmandu, Nepal

• Prepared business plans for community-based water supply projects in Nepal, for the Department of Water Supply and Sanitation, Government of Nepal.
• Developed a smart water supply master plan for the development of Lumbini as a smart city, for the Department of Urban Development and Building Construction, Ministry of Urban Development, Nepal.

University of Twente and Planet Labs, the Netherlands

• Modelling soil–vegetation–atmosphere interaction, working on both process-based land surface modelling and deep learning approaches to water and carbon fluxes.
• Supervised by Prof. dr. Bob Su, dr. Yijian Zeng and dr. Joost Beckers.

Technical University of Munich, Germany

• Graduated with 1.4/5.0 on the German scale, where 1.0 is the highest mark.
• Thesis on the role of near-surface versus sub-surface soil moisture in vegetation functioning, which became the 2024 Biogeosciences paper.

Institute of Engineering (IOE), Tribhuvan University, Nepal

• Ranked 20th out of 192, with 77.7%.
• Thesis on flood inundation mapping of the Babai River.

• Project on quantization in foundation models. Supported by CESOC, ECMWF, TRA Modelling at the University of Bonn, Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Cologne.

• National merit scholarship supporting master's study, awarded at the Technical University of Munich.

• Merit scholarship supporting bachelor's study at Tribhuvan University.
• Ranked 8th out of 9048 in the IOE entrance examination.

• Hydrological and Environmental River Basin Modelling, Integrated Water Resources Management, and Rapidly Varying Flow.

Lalitpur, Nepal

• Designed and taught an elective on Python and GIS for water resources, and ran tutorials for Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulics.

Water Resources department, ITC, University of Twente

An interactive app for the WUNDER weather and soil moisture loggers, so that farmers at the food forests can follow drought as it develops.

Open the app · Source on GitHub