Ir. S. (Shashwat) Shukla

Profile

An overarching theme of my research is to advance the surface and subsurface science of rapidly evolving polar environments on the Earth and other planetary settings from the analysis of multi-wavelength remote sensing data. I endeavour to unravel intriguing science questions relevant to the nature and origin of geophysical processes, serving as a cornerstone to the planetary-scale climate change.

I am a graduate (cum laude) in Geo-information Science and Earth Observation from the Faculty ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Prior to this, at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, I have had a professional experience in exploring the transferability and reproducibility of space science mission data to a diverse range of novel application settings. Currently, I am employed as a PhD candidate in the Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geoscience of TU Delft, The Netherlands. In my free time, I like to cook food, stay in fitness regime, and I am always up for travelling, especially hiking in the mountains.

Research

As part of my current research, I am involved in the HiRISE project to envisage the science behind the changes in the firn layers on Antarctic ice shelves, thereby revealing new insights into our future projections of ice shelf stability aligned with global sea level rise trends. In order to achieve my research goals, I aim to integrate multiple sources of remote sensing data and geo-information with physical/chemical models for reliable inferences to the ground truth measurements. This synergy, when applied to geoscience, is what makes my research distinctive and also carrying it out fun.

  • Shukla S., Tolpekin V., Kumar S., and Stein A., Investigating the Retention of Solar Wind Implanted Helium-3 on the Moon from the Analysis of Multi- Wavelength Remote Sensing Data. Remote Sensing, 12, 3350, 2020.
  • Çöltekin A., Lochhead I., Madden M., Christophe S., Devaux A., Pettit C., Lock O., Shukla S., Herman L., Stachon Z., Kubícek P., Snopková D., Bernardes S., and Hedley N., Extended Reality in Spatial Sciences: A Review of Research Challenges and Future Directions. ISPRS International Journal of Geo- Information, 9, 439, 2020.
  • Shukla S., Maiti A., Patterson G. W., Prem P., Bhiravarasu S. S., Tolpekin V. A., and Kumar S., Modelling the Physical Nature of Lunar Regolith at S-Band and L- Band Wavelengths using the Chandrayaan-2 DFSAR and LRO Mini-RF Radars, 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 2020.
  • Shukla S., Maiti A., Patterson G. W., Prem P., Cahill J. T. S., Thomson B. J., Tolpekin V. A., and Kumar S., Mini-RF Global and Polar S-Band Maps of the Variation in the Moon’s Regolith Dielectric Constant, 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 2020.
  • Shukla S., and Kumar S., Effect of Polarization Orientation Angle Compensation on Airborne L-Band UAVSAR Data for the Munich Area, Germany, EUSAR 2018: 12th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar, Aachen, Germany, June 2018.
  • Majumdar S., Shukla S., and Maiti A. Open Agent Based Runoff and Erosion Simulation (OARES): A Generic Cross Platform Tool for Spatio-temporal Watershed Monitoring using Climate Forecast System Reanalysis Weather Data, ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., Delft, The Netherlands, IV-4, 125-132, September 2018.
  • Shukla S., Kumar S., and Tolpekin V. A., Petrophysical Insights into Lunar Mafic Extrusive Basalts over Reiner Gamma Formation, in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2019.
  • Shukla S., Kumar S., and Tolpekin V. A., Revisiting the Retention Framework of Lunar Helium-3 through Space Weathering Processes and its Implications, Lunar ISRU Conference, Columbia, Maryland, July 2019.
  • Shukla S., Kumar S., and Tolpekin V. A., Advancing to Lunar Lava Tube Sensing: A New Radar Perspective of Philolaus Skylight Candidates, 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, March 2019.
  • Shukla S., Majumdar S., Maiti A., and Kumar S., New Insights into Solar Wind Implanted Volatiles for Lunar Regolith Characterization: A Simulation based Approach, ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., Delft, The Netherlands, IV-4, 199-206, September 2018.
  • Shukla S., and Kumar S., Remote Compositional Pyroxene Estimates in the Reiner Gamma Formation Using Feature-Oriented PCA: New Insights into Lunar Swirls, IGARSS 2018: 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Valencia, Spain, 1624-1627, July 2018.
  • Shukla S., and Kumar S., Hybrid Polarimetric Decomposition Modelling of Lunar Surface for Scattering Characterization using Miniature RADAR data, EUSAR 2018: 12th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar, Aachen, Germany, June 2018.
  • Shukla S., Kumar S., and Agrawal S., Mineral Mapping of FeO and TiO2 of the Cassini crater using Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) of Chandrayaan–1, ACRS 2017: 38th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing, New Delhi, India, October 2017.
  • Maiti A., Majumdar S., Shukla S., Koti S. R., and Gupta P. K., An Open Source WebGIS-based Precise Satellite Tracking and Visualisation Tool using Two Line Element Data, ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., Dehradun, India, IV-5, 109-114, October 2018.
  • Shukla S., Venkatesan A., Venkatesan N., Dheenadhayalan R., and Monica R., Integrated Alarm Annunciation System with Dual Communication Capability and Operator-assisted Messaging for Nuclear Power Plant Applications, 2016 SAI Computing Conference (SAI), London, UK, 893-901, July 2016.

State and Fate of Antarctica’s Gatekeepers: a High-Resolution approach for Ice ShElf instability (HiRISE)

Antarctica is the single largest unknown in the current projections of sea level rise. For a large part, this is due to the uncertainty of how ice shelves will evolve in a changing climate. To reduce this uncertainty, we combine field measurements, satellite data, and climate models to chart the current state of the current state of Antarctica’s ice shelves with high resolution and accuracy. This knowledge will then be exploited to improve our estimates of how the stability of the ice shelves will change in the coming centuries, in which way this impacts the ice loss of Antarctica and what this implies for water levels at the Dutch coast.

Shashwat Shukla

PhD candidate

Availability:
Monday till Friday