Upmanu Lall

About

Upmanu Lall is the director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University and a professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems within the College of Global Futures. Prior to joining ASU in January 2024, he was the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and served as Director of the Columbia Water Center. His work encompasses hydrology, climate dynamics, statistics, machine learning, and risk/insurance analysis, with a focus on developing and implementing financial, technical, and policy solutions for water and climate challenges across various scales from village to country on all major continents. Lall has led initiatives such as the Global Water Sustainability Initiative, the Global Flood Initiative, and the America’s Water Initiative, contributing significantly to the field through research and collaboration with development banks, governments, and the private sector.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Geography
• Meteorology
• Environmental planning
• Engineering
• Geology
• Natural resource economics
• Ecology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• Can runoff modeled at coarse resolution simulate floods at finer resolutions? A case study over the Ohio River Basin

  Advances in Water Resources · 2025-10-19 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  • The VIC model with a kinematic wave routing model reasonably simulates flood statistics and reproduces flood events. • Smaller catchments with dams have large errors, but neglecting dams does not impact model results in larger basins. • VIC-simulated runoff and the subsequent routed floods are insensitive to subdaily model timesteps but are sensitive to spatial resolution. Recent studies on flood-generating mechanisms have advanced understanding of the hydrologic processes that lead to riverin…

  PublisherDOI

• A multilevel Bayesian approach to climate-fueled migration and conflict

  Scientific Reports · 2025-11-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Do climate conditions and extreme events fuel conflict and migration? This question has been widely studied using causal designs that exploit natural variation in climate variables, often analyzed with linear fixed-effects models. Yet in this setting, nonlinear relationships, distributional features of outcomes, and spatial heterogeneity can cause these models to violate core assumptions and yield unreliable inferences. We propose a multilevel Bayesian framework that accommodates such features w…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Financial losses associated with US floods occur with frequent low-return-period precipitation

  Nature Water · 2025-09-19 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Precipitation, moderated by spring temperature and vegetation, drives runoff efficiency in the Upper Colorado River Basin, USA

  Communications Earth & Environment · 2025-12-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Streamflow in the Upper Colorado River Basin, USA has decreased proportionally more than precipitation in the recent multi-decadal drought. The causes are debated. Understanding how precipitation, and seasonal temperature, vegetation, and evapotranspiration dynamics affect streamflow is essential. Here we use causal inference with historical data to identify surface runoff efficiency drivers. Runoff efficiency increases in years with higher precipitation and snow accumulation accompanie…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)

  ArXiv.org · 2026-05-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reliable assessment of tropical cyclone (TC) risk is limited by the brevity and spatial sparsity of the historical record, particularly for the rare, high-intensity landfalls that dominate insured loss. We present WHITS (Wind-focused Hurricane Interactive Track Simulator), a non-parametric semi-Markov track generator that extends the HITS framework of Nakamura et al. (2015) in three ways: transitions between historical track segments are conditioned on local wind speed in addition to position, a…

  PublisherOA PDF

Recent grants

• WSC-Category 3 Collaborative: America's Water - The Changing Landscape of Risk, Competing Demands and Climate

  NSF · $2.5M · 2014–2019

• Belmont Forum Collaborative Research:Data-driven Disaster Response Systems Dependent on Time of Day, Season and Location for Megacities

  NSF · $300k · 2021–2025

• NSF Convergence Accelerator Track D America's Water Risk: Water System Data Pooling for Climate Vulnerability Assessment and Warning System

  NSF · $1000k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Naresh Devineni

  City College of New York

  125 shared

• Balaji Rajagopalan

  86 shared

• Edward R. Cook

  Columbia University

  41 shared

• Francesco Cioffi

  Sapienza University of Rome

  40 shared

• Xun Sun

  39 shared

• Hyun‐Han Kwon

  Sejong University

  36 shared

• Michael R. Petersen

  United States Army Command and General Staff College

  36 shared

• D. Nagesh Kumar

  Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering

  University of Texas at Austin

  1981

• M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering

  University of Texas at Austin

  1980

• Other, Civil Engineering

  Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, U.P., India

  1976

Awards & honors

• American Society of Civil Engineers Arid Lands Hydrology Awa…
• European Geosciences Union Henry Darcy Medal (2014)
• American Geophysical Union President of the Natural Hazards…
• American Geophysical Union Fellow (2017)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (…

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• Stephanie Forresth-81
• Sara Walkerh-47
• Manfred Laubichlerh-43