Research Associate Professor
Departmental Affiliation: Physics
JCET Research Group: Climate and Radiation
GSFC Code: 613
Phone: (301) 614-6227
Most Recent Publication:
Kundu, P. K. and R. K. Siddani, 2007. A New Class of Probability Distributions for Describing the Spatial Statistics of Area-averaged Rainfall (with R.K. Siddani), J. Geophys. Res. 112, D18113, doi:10.1029/2006JD008042.
Analysis and mathematical modeling of space-time variability of global precipitation data sets derived from satellite and ground-based measurements, especially the scale-dependence of the statistical properties.
Dr. Prasun K. Kundu received a B.Sc. (with honors) in Physics from Calcutta University, India in 1974 and a M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 1976. He then joined the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Rochester in New York, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1981 in Theoretical Physics for his work on a new class of exact and asymptotic solution the Einstein field equations of general relativity. During 1980-82, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago and from 1982-85, he was an instructor at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. In 1985 he joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio University, Athens as an assistant professor, where he taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in Physics and continued research in relativistic gravitation theory.
Since 1992 he has worked at the Climate and Radiation Branch, GSFC on various aspects of rainfall statistics related to Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and other satellite- and ground-based remote sensing measurements of precipitation. For his work he received an exceptional scientific support award in 2000.
Dr. Kundu is currently a Research Associate Professor at JCET, UMBC. He has taught graduate level physics courses in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics at UMBC and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. His past work in collaboration with Dr. T. L. Bell at GSFC involves theoretical development of stochastic dynamical models of precipitation and their application to rainfall sampling problems. He has recently co-supervised the Ph.D. dissertation of Mr. R.K. Siddani, a graduate student at the Mathematics and Statistics Department, UMBC, leading to the discovery of a novel type of probability distribution governing the statistics of rainfall.